JUNIAU, Alaska (AP) — The Biden administration has approved plans to sell oil and gas leases in Alaska, leaving the door open to drilling in part of the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The sale will take place on January 9, less than two weeks before President Joe Biden leaves office. It will include a fraction of the total land available for bid in a sale during the Trump administration about four years ago.
President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to expand U.S. oil drilling in his latest bid for the White House, and he has pointed to the passage of a 2017 law that made Monday’s announcement possible as a high point as things go about Alaska’s policy.
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The 2017 law mandated two lease sales by the end of 2024, but major oil companies withheld the first sale. The Biden administration reviewed the leasing program and seven leases from the initial sale were ultimately canceled.
Does this mean the shelter will be drilled?
It’s unclear. A lease sale is one step in a long process, one that can often become embroiled in lawsuits. Lawsuits are ongoing over the first lease sale, and environmentalists have vowed to go to court to keep drilling out of the refuge.
There are other examples: The Biden administration’s approval of the big Willow oil project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, west of the refuge, has yet to be settled in court, nearly two years after it was given the green light to to continue. . The company behind Willow, ConocoPhillips Alaska, is now continuing to work on the project.
Once leases are issued for the refuge, potential exploration or development plans would still need to undergo an environmental review, according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
What does a sale entail?
The law called for lease sales in the refuge’s coastal plain, a swath of about 1.5 million hectares (more than 6 million acres) of the vast, wild refuge bordering the Beaufort Sea. The coastal plain covers a small part of the refuge, which features an array of landscapes and provides habitat for wildlife including polar bears, caribou, musk oxen and birds. The debate over whether the coastal plain should be opened to drilling has been going on for decades.
Indigenous Gwich’in leaders consider the coastal plain sacred, and caribou, the Gwich’in, rely on calves there. Meanwhile, leaders of the Iñupiaq community of Kaktovik, which is located in the refuge, have supported the drilling.
The Bureau of Land Management said the area that would be available for leasing next month requires the smallest possible footprint of potential surface disturbance and avoids key areas where polar bears and caribou calve. This would amount to 400,000 acres (nearly 162,000 hectares), the minimum required by the 2017 law, the agency said. That compares with about 1.1 million acres included in the initial sale.
The bids in the first sale were for nearly 553,000 acres (about 224,000 hectares), the agency said at the time. Two of the leases were later canceled by the small companies that owned them amid legal wrangling and uncertainty over the drilling program. Seven leases acquired by a state-owned company were canceled by the Biden administration. There is a lawsuit regarding the termination of the lease.
What happens next?
Erik Grafe, an attorney with Earthjustice who has been involved in lawsuits surrounding the refuge, said his organization would go to court “as often as necessary” to protect the refuge from oil drilling.
Many environmentalists and climate scientists have urged a phase-out of fossil fuels to avert the worst effects of climate change.
Although the Bureau of Land Management has said the coastal plain could hold 4.25 billion to 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil, there is limited information on the quantity and quality of the oil there.
Drilling supporters, including some Alaska political leaders, have expressed frustration with the restrictions placed on the planned lease sales and said they hope for a change in approach under Trump.
Nagruk Harcharek, president of Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, an advocacy group whose members include Alaska North Slope leaders, characterized the scope of the new lease as “a deliberate attempt by the Biden administration’s Department of the Interior to maximize development potential undermine” in the future. refuge.
He said it goes against the wishes of North Slope Iñupiat, especially those in Kaktovik.
