WASHINGTON— The Center for Biological Diversity sued the Interior Department today for its ongoing failure to examine the harms from offshore oil and gas drilling infrastructure the oil industry has not decommissioned.

In the Gulf of Mexico, more than 2,700 wells and nearly 500 platforms were overdue for decommissioning — which requires plugging wells and removing platforms or other equipment — as of June 2023. These inactive wells and platforms pose serious environmental and safety risks, including oil spills, methane leaks and explosions.

“Cleaning up after yourself isn’t just a kindergarten skill, it’s the law. We now know the oil industry isn’t properly dealing with its mess and federal agencies have ignored these risks for years,” said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Interior needs to take a hard look at how old leaky wells, rusty platforms and corroding pipelines put the ocean ecosystem at constant risk of spills and other harms. Private companies shouldn’t be allowed to make huge amounts of money drilling in public waters and then leave a wasteland for taxpayers.”

The law requires that offshore oil and gas operators permanently plug wells, remove platforms and restore the seafloor environment once leases expire or infrastructure has been inactive for a certain period of time. But recent Government Accountability Office reports revealed that oil companies do not decommission wells within the deadlines. The investigations also found that Interior has been permitting decommissioning-in-place without adequately studying or minimizing the risks posed by this old equipment.

Interior has never examined the environmental harms from unplugged wells, idle platforms and other infrastructure. The department last released an environmental analysis of Gulf oil and gas decommissioning in 2005, but that analysis assumed oil and gas infrastructure would be decommissioned within the legal timeframes. And the nearly 20-year-old analysis ignores harms from delayed decommissioning to critically endangered Rice’s whales, sea turtles, eastern black rails and other imperiled wildlife.

Today’s lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C., says federal agencies have violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to consider new information and changed circumstances showing that delayed decommissioning puts people and the environment at risk. The lawsuit seeks to force Interior to conduct a new analysis that will better protect people, wildlife and the Gulf environment.

Nearly 600 idle wells in the Gulf have not even been temporarily plugged to prevent leaks before decommissioning. More than 800 idle wells have been unused for more than a decade.