The Trump administration indefinitely halted plans for a major coal lease auction this week on about 3,508 acres of Wyoming’s federal land after a similar sale in Montana failed to meet expectations.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) planned to auction off access of up to 365 million tons of coal across Campbell and Converse counties. The BLM wrote in a planning document it expects the “recoverable/ minable” amount of coal to be around 365 million tons.
That sale would have been the first major Wyoming coal lease sale in a decade. Lands involved in that sale were located in the Powder River Basin, about 15 miles south of Wright.
Navajo Transitional Energy was the only bidder that made an offer in Monday’s sale of 1,262 acres in Montana’s Powder River Basin. That land contained an