Newly elected President Donald J. One of Trump’s biggest “Drill, Baby, Drill” initiatives suffered a major blow on Wednesday, as the Interior Department announced that a lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ended without a single bidder. .
The sale, which was required by Congress, is the second time in four years that an attempt has been made to auction off oil and gas leases in the pristine wilderness — home to migrating caribou, polar bears, musk oxen, millions of birds and other wildlife. Is. a flop.
The repeated failures show that oil companies either are not interested in drilling in the refuge or do not think it is worth the cost, despite the insistence of Mr. Trump and many Republican lawmakers that drilling the refuge be prohibited. Should be opened for. The Biden administration offered 400,000 acres after cutting one million acres from the original boundaries to avoid areas critical to polar bear and porcupine caribou populations.
“The lack of interest from oil companies in development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge reflects what we and they have known all along: Some places are too special and sacred for oil and gas drilling,” said Acting Laura Daniel-Davis. . the Deputy Secretary of the Interior Department said in a statement.
Some Alaska lawmakers and officials, including the governor, had said before the sale that the Biden administration’s decision to shrink the leasing area would guarantee failure. Republican lawmakers have said the wilderness area could face billions of dollars in windfall profits as soon as drillers are allowed inside the refuge.
But Ms. Daniel-Davis said the oil and gas industry is “sitting on millions of acres of undeveloped leases elsewhere” and should act on those first. “We would suggest this is a prudent place to start rather than pursuing a speculative lease in one of the most spectacular locations in the world,” he said.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge extends approximately 19 million acres along the North Slope of Alaska. It is one of the last truly wild places in the United States. It also includes lands considered sacred by the Alaska Native group Gwich’in.
Several major banks have said that they will not finance any projects in the refuge. Drilling there would be difficult and expensive because there are no roads or facilities.
But for Mr Trump, asylum is a field of dreams. He has called it “the largest discovery anywhere in the world, as big as Saudi Arabia,” and during the campaign he frequently attacked President Biden’s efforts to protect the wilderness area. On Monday, Mr. Trump said drilling in the expansion is one of his top energy priorities and pledged that extracting its “liquid gold” would help lower the price of gasoline and groceries.
“We’re going to open ANWR,” he said, using the acronym for refuge. “We’re going to do all kinds of things that no one thinks are possible.”
Democrats and Republicans have been fighting over the question of drilling in the Alaskan wilderness for half a century. Drilling in the refuge was banned in 1980. The ban ended with the 2017 tax bill that Congress passed and Mr. Trump signed into law in his first term. He often takes credit for opening the shelter.
“I’m done with it,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in October. “Ronald Reagan couldn’t get it done. No one could complete it. I accomplished it.”
Republicans passed legislation that would require two lease sales in ANWR by 2024. He predicted that the leases would generate $2 billion in royalties over 10 years. Half will go to the state of Alaska, and the other half will help pay for Mr. Trump’s tax cuts.
Two weeks before Mr. Trump leaves office in 2021, the Interior Department held the first auction. It was useless.
Alaska’s state-owned Economic Development Corporation was the only bidder on nine tracts offered for lease in the northernmost part of the refuge, and no bids were received on half of the offered leases. The Interior Department reported that the auction received bids totaling $14.4 million.
After Mr Biden took office, his administration suspended the leases, saying the Interior Department had not adequately analyzed the impact of drilling in the environmentally sensitive area. Then, the leases sold in the 2021 auction were seized, abandoned or canceled by the Biden administration.
The new environmental review released in November recommended additional protections for wildlife, waterways and permafrost. It called for restricting leases in the northern and western part of the grounds, which are areas not used by the porcupine caribou herd.
In the sale held this week, the Biden administration offered 400,000 acres of land, the minimum amount required by law. The last date for bid submission was January 6.
The state of Alaska sued the Biden administration on Monday over the size of the lease area, saying it made the area economically unviable for oil drilling. If Alaska is successful in its lawsuit, the Trump administration could potentially reschedule the sale and offer more land.
Governor Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, wrote a post Said on social media that the Biden administration “disguised its latest approval on Alaska as a lease sale in ANWR”, which is “designed to fail” and is an energy-saving “nightmare” for the state. Is part of.