The agency will make 161,874 ha available to drillers at the auction, the minimum required by a law that mandated the sale. — Bloomberg
WASHINGTON: The Biden administration will offer oil and gas drilling leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) at a sale on Jan 9, the US Interior Department says.
The agency will make 161,874 ha available to drillers at the auction, the minimum required by a law that mandated the sale.
ANWR is a 7.6 million-ha refuge for species including polar bears and Porcupine caribou.
The wild landscape lacks roads and public facilities, but its 640,000-ha coastal area along the Beaufort Sea is estimated to have up to 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
The Bureau of Land Management, the division of Interior that will oversee the sale, said the acreage on offer will avoid areas important to polar bear denning and caribou calving.
Alaska’s elected officials have sought for years to open drilling in the reserve to secure jobs and revenue for the state.
The US Congress opened up ANWR to oil and gas development as part of the 2017 tax bill.
US Senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican from Alaska, complained about the scale of the planned sale and said the administration was ignoring the will of Indigenous people who would benefit from oil and gas development in ANWR.
A native group, Voice of the Arctic Inupiat, said in a statement that the sale’s size undermined economic potential for the region.
Oil industry group the American Petroleum Institute also criticised the offering, though drillers largely failed to turn out four years ago for the first and only ANWR oil and gas auction.
The previous administration of President-elect Donald Trump sold oil and gas leases in ANWR in 2021, but the sale generated just US$14.4mil in high bids, with an Alaska state agency as the sole bidder for most of the acreage sold.
Biden’s Interior Department cancelled the leases in 2023, citing a flawed environmental analysis.
An Alaska-based environmental group said oil and gas development in ANWR would destroy an important ecosystem.
“The Arctic Refuge deserves to remain a place of refuge, not an industrial oilfield lining the pockets of big oil executives,” Kristen Miller, executive director of Alaska Wilderness League, said in a statement.
Companies that extract fuels on the leases will pay royalties of 16.67% to the US government, according to a sale document. — Reuters
