Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado

Facts of the Case

Provided by Oyez

The Surface Transportation Board (STB) granted a petition from the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition to construct and operate an 80-mile railway in Utah’s Uinta Basin. The railway’s primary purpose would be to transport waxy crude oil from the basin to the national rail network. The STB conducted an environmental review process, including the preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The Board issued a final decision in December 2021, authorizing the construction and operation of the railway subject to environmental mitigation conditions.

In its environmental analysis, the STB considered various impacts of the railway’s construction and operation within the project area, including effects on water resources, air quality, special status species, land use, and local economies. However, the Board declined to analyze certain “downline impacts”—effects from increased train traffic on existing rail lines beyond the new railway. The STB also omitted analysis of other potential environmental effects, such as increased crude oil refining impacts on Gulf Coast communities, upline impacts of increased drilling in the Uinta Basin, and downline effects of potential oil spills along the Colorado River. Finally, the Board did not disclose the potential effects of the project on historic sites or structures along the Union Pacific line in Eagle County. The Board justified these omissions by arguing that minimal increases in train traffic on existing lines were unlikely to cause significant impacts, and that some effects were beyond the scope of its regulatory authority.

Eagle County asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to review the Board’s orders, and the granted the petitions in part, denied them in part, and vacated the underlying order.

Questions

Does the National Environmental Policy Act require an agency to study environmental impacts beyond the proximate effects of the action over which the agency has regulatory authority?

Conclusions

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires federal agencies to consider the environmental effects of federal projects by preparing a detailed environmental impact statement (EIS), but it does not impose substantive limits on agencies’ decisions. NEPA only applies to the environmental consequences of the proposed project itself, not to impacts from future or geographically separate projects that the proposed project might cause. The Surface Transportation Board complied with NEPA by addressing the environmental effects of constructing and operating an 88-mile freight railroad in Utah. NEPA did not require the Board to evaluate environmental impacts from increased oil drilling in the Uinta Basin or increased oil refining along the Gulf Coast—both of which were separate activities outside the Board’s regulatory control. Justice Brett Kavanaugh authored the 5-3 majority opinion of the Court, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett.

NEPA’s role is procedural: it ensures agencies and the public are informed about potential environmental effects but does not direct agencies to reject projects with environmental downsides. Courts reviewing an EIS must apply a “rule of reason” and defer to the agency’s decisions about the scope and detail of environmental analysis, recognizing that such decisions depend on scientific, technical, and policy judgments that fall within the agency’s expertise. Agencies have discretion to omit analysis of speculative or weakly connected effects—particularly when those effects depend on future decisions by other entities or fall under the authority of other regulators. The Board’s choice not to analyze upstream drilling or downstream refining effects was reasonable because those were not part of the project under review and because the Board lacks the authority to control such activities.

A mere possibility that a project might lead to additional development does not impose an obligation under NEPA to assess all environmental impacts of hypothetical, unrelated projects. Even if a project’s effects are foreseeable, NEPA does not make one agency responsible for evaluating the far-reaching environmental costs of others’ conduct unless those effects are directly caused by the agency’s decision and fall within its regulatory scope. Therefore, the Board’s approval of the railway project, based on an EIS that focused on the rail line itself, satisfied NEPA’s requirements.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor authored an opinion concurring in the judgment, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, agreeing that the Board was not responsible for assessing the environmental effects of oil production because it lacked authority to regulate those downstream and upstream activities.

Justice Neil Gorsuch took no part in the decision.