When the Bureau of Land Management finalized its repeal of the Public Lands Rule earlier this year, the largely outraged public response focused on both the blow to wildlife habitat preservation, and the benefits for oil and gas leasing.
But the rule, established in 2024, was also poised to reshape how energy infrastructure developers — including of transmission, solar, and geothermal projects — navigate the federal permitting bottleneck, via the creation of a new tool: mitigation leases.
That mechanism would have allowed developers to offset the impact of a project by supporting restoration or mitigation efforts elsewhere on BLM property, which spans 245 million acres of land and 700 million acres of subsurface. A solar developer whose project would disturb wildlife on one parcel, for example, could apply for a mitigation lease to restore habitat on another BLM parcel to satisfy the conditions of their permit.
Now, however, developers won’t have that option. In effect, BLM just repealed a pathway that would have made it easier to build — right at a moment when the grid needs all the new capacity it can get.
According to Clean Air Task Force senior associate Kelsey Landau, this repeal has gotten less attention than orders to stop work entirely on certain offshore wind farms, as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issued in late 2025 — but it’s still a major step backward for permitting major energy infrastructure. “It’s all part of the same picture,” she said, “which is that…the regulatory uncertainty and rollbacks that we’ve seen are quite a challenge for clean energy developers, and developers more broadly.”
Of course, a future Democrat-led administration could try to undo the Trump administration’s more sweeping changes and reinstate Biden-era policies like the Public Lands Rule. But regardless of the rule’s ultimate fate, Landau said, the uncertainty is bad for all technologies.
For example, though the Trump administration issued a categorical exclusion for geothermal exploration — which has the support of Energy Secretary Chris Wright — full-scale commercial projects are still likely to run into the same mitigation permitting challenges facing other forms of renewable energy.
The bigger question for developers, Landau added, is whether uncertainty “will lead to developers trying to restrict their federal nexus altogether.” That may be particularly tricky for geothermal projects, because a large share of both existing capacity and the best-suited areas for future development are on land managed by federal agencies.
Longstanding challenges
Mitigation requirements for energy projects are triggered through multiple federal statutes including the National Environmental Policy Act, as well as state, local, and tribal laws. They have long created hurdles for energy developers seeking permits; renewables and transmission projects, with their large above-ground footprints, have been especially hard-pressed.
The SunZia line, for example, which came online in New Mexico this summer, faced years of debate over whether its impacts on desert ecosystems, fire management, and military installations were mitigatable. By the time BLM was processing route amendments for the project, stakeholders argued that certain environmental conditions had changed, and therefore the original mitigation plan needed to be revisited and strengthened. The project ultimately re-routed segments of the line, donated environmental mitigation lands, and agreed to bury portions of the line underground to address military concerns, among other changes.
This work is expensive, especially when it’s not clear how much will need to be done. SunZia’s developer warned in federal comments in the mid 2010s that the mitigation work, added late in the development process, materially changed the project’s economics.
The purpose of mitigation leases in the Public Land Rule was to create a standard pathway for complying with those conditions: offsetting impacts through a defined leasing framework, and thereby lowering litigation risk and giving developers more certainty that their plans would be accepted — and ultimately keeping projects on track.
Frank Sturges, a senior attorney at CATF, warned that by rescinding the rule, the Interior Department has consigned the industry to status quo mitigation requirements that could slow or complicate new energy projects of all kinds, not just wind and solar.
“The mitigation leasing program created a framework that project proponents could satisfy mitigation requirements…effectively, quickly, and in a way that would protect the environment and serve the various missions of the Bureau of Land Management,” Sturges explained. CATF was engaged in the creation of the rule back in 2023, he added, in large part because of its potential to remove permitting barriers for clean energy and transmission development. (While Congress has made moves to reform permitting more fully in the years since, those efforts have largely failed; the latest remains stalled for political reasons.)
Given that the rule was only put into place in mid-2024, no mitigation leases were actually finalized before its repeal, Landau added: “Basically, BLM put this tool in the toolbox that would help developers build projects, and then yanked it away before it could be accessed.”
