The US Justice Department reached a court agreement with environmental groups and energy companies to redo an environmental impact statement that relied on the assumption that 1 billion barrels of oil could be produced from the fields in question.
In January, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals deemed that estimate of economically recoverable oil to be "arbitrary and capricious" and nullified permits won in Lease Sale 193 by the likes of Shell, ConocoPhillips and Statoil.
The
