Oil Lease Sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to be Held This Week
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is located in the northeast corner of Alaska and stretches across an area of over 78,000 square kilometers (almost the size of Austria).
A congressionally mandated oil lease sale for Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will be held on January 10th. The Biden administration has moved to limit the lease sale to 400,000 acres, the smallest acreage required by law.
The US Bureau of Land Management has announced that the bid opening for the oil and gas lease sale for Alaska's Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) will be held on January 10th.
The upcoming sale is the second lease sale for the ANWR, which Congress mandated in the Tax Act of 2017 during the previous Trump administration.
In December, the Biden administration announced it had finalized restrictions on the sale to protect wildlife and the environment. Furthermore, it adopted the alternative that limits the lease sale to 400,000 acres, which is the minimum amount required by the Tax Act.
The chosen alternative best balances the five purposes of the refuge by presenting a pathway to provide maximum protection for the conservation purposes of the refuge while meeting the requirement under the Tax Act, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) states.
It furthermore notes that the area offered for sale will avoid important polar bear denning and Porcupine caribou herd calving areas.
It is a high-cost, highly speculative play
"This also has the smallest footprint of potential surface disturbance due to No Surface Occupancy stipulations, and limits seismic exploration to the areas available for leasing," writes the BLM.
Controversial development
Oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been debated for many years.
As reported by Alaska Beacon, environmentalists and some Indigenous groups in Alaska and parts of northwestern Canada have opposed the development as the area is an important calving ground for the porcupine caribou herd, while Alaska politicians and several Inupiat organizations have campaigned to open the area to oil development because of the potential economic benefits.
Extraction in the wildlife reserve was forbidden until the 2017 Tax Act lifted the ban and allowed the sale of licenses for oil extraction in the refuge's coastal plain.
The bill from 2017 required the BLM to hold two lease sales in the coastal plain within seven years of its enactment, and the first one was conducted in 2021.
In the first sale, some of the licenses were sold to minor companies, which later withdrew from the leases. The biggest oil companies, however, showed no significant interest. The main bidder was the state's development agency, Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA).
In 2023, the Biden administration eventually canceled the remaining ANWR leases won during the first sale, citing a lack of environmental analyses, writes Alaska Public Media.
The upcoming sale occurs only ten days before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, who has called for more oil drilling in the refuge.
In an interview with HNN, Larry Persily, publisher of the Alaska-based newspaper Wrangell Sentinel, said he expects the new administration will push for more acreage in ANWR going out for bid.
"But I would be surprised if any major oil company, or even any middle oil company, submits bids. It is a high-cost, highly speculative play," Persily added.
