Biden’s approval of an oil lease sale will keep the door open to drilling in Alaska’s Arctic refuge

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — The Biden administration has approved plans for a sale of oil and gas leases in Alaska that leaves open the door for drilling in a portion of the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The sale will be held Jan. 9, less than two weeks before President Joe Biden leaves office. It will include a fraction of the land total that was available for bidding roughly four years ago in a sale held during the Trump administration.

President-elect Donald Trump pledged during his latest run for the White House to expand oil drilling in the U.S., and he’s pointed to the passage of a 2017 law that enabled Monday’s announcement as a highlight when it comes to Alaska policy.

The 2017 law mandated two lease sales by late 2024, but major oil companies sat out the first sale. The Biden administration reviewed the leasing program, and seven leases from the first sale ultimately were canceled.

Does this mean there will be drilling in the refuge?

It’s unclear. A lease sale is one step in a long process — one that can often get mired in litigation. There are ongoing lawsuits surrounding the first lease sale, and environmentalists have vowed to go to court to keep drilling out of the refuge.

There are other examples, too: the Biden administration’s approval of the large Willow oil project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, west of the refuge, has yet to be settled in the courts, nearly two years after it got the green light to proceed. The company behind Willow, ConocoPhillips Alaska, has been continuing work on the project in the meantime.

Once any leases are issued for the refuge, potential exploration or development plans would still have to undergo environmental review, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has said.

What does a sale involve?

The law called for lease sales in the refuge’s coastal plain, a roughly 1.5-million acre (more than 6 million hectare) swath of the vast, wild refuge that borders the Beaufort Sea. The coastal plain accounts for a small part of the refuge, which boasts an array of landscapes and provides habitat for wildlife including polar bears, caribou, musk ox and birds. Debate over whether to open the coastal plain to drilling has gone on for decades.

Indigenous Gwich’in leaders consider the coastal plain sacred, and caribou the Gwich’in rely on calve there. Meanwhile, leaders of the Iñupiaq community of Kaktovik, which is within the refuge, have supported drilling.

The Bureau of Land Management said the area that would be available for lease next month calls for the smallest footprint of potential surface disturbance and avoids key polar bear denning and caribou calving areas. It would involve 400,000 acres (nearly 162,000 hectares), the minimum required by the 2017 law, the agency said. That compares to about 1.1 million acres (4.4 million hectares) included in the first sale.

Bids in the first sale covered nearly 553,000 acres (about 224,000 hectares) the agency said at the time. Two of the leases were later given up by the small companies that held them amid legal wrangling and uncertainty over the drilling program. Seven leases that were acquired by a state corporation were canceled by the Biden administration. Litigation surrounding the lease cancellation is pending.

What happens next?

Erik Grafe, an attorney with Earthjustice who has been involved in litigation 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 pushed for a phase-out of fossil fuels to avert the worst consequences of climate change.

While the Bureau of Land Management has said the coastal plain could contain 4.25 billion to 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil, there is limited information about the amount and quality of oil that’s there.

Drilling supporters, including some Alaska political leaders, have expressed frustration with the constraints set on the planned lease sale 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 sale as “a deliberate attempt by the Biden administration’s Interior Department to kneecap the potential of development” in the refuge.

He said it goes against the wishes of North Slope Iñupiat, particularly those in Kaktovik.