Biden administration announces congressionally mandated Arctic refuge lease sale

The United States government will move forward with a congressionally mandated lease sale on the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the US Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management announced.

BLM released a final record of decision on its Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement Dec. 9, as well as a notice of sale for 400,000 acres in the northwest portion of the 1.6 million-acre Coastal Plain for Jan. 9, 2025.

The lease sale "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," BLM said in a release.

The sale was mandated by the US Congress in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, former president and current President-elect Donald Trump's marquee tax legislation, which required BLM to offer two lease sales within seven years of the law's enactment.

"Oil and gas development in the Arctic Refuge is a direct threat to some of the last untouched landscapes on Alaska's North Slope and to the caribou herds that the Gwich'in people rely on," Dan Ritzman, director of Seirra Club's Conservation Campaign, said in a statement. "The 2017 Tax Act, forced through Congress by Donald Trump and his Big Oil CEO allies, opened up the Coastal Plain to oil and gas leasing. Letting him oversee a lease sale over these pristine lands would be beyond irresponsible."

First leases canceled

BLM made the first of the two mandated sales under Trump, issuing nine leases total. A 2021 executive order by President Joe Biden directed Interior to review the leasing program, however, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland suspended all Arctic refuge leasing activities until a comprehensive analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act could be completed.

In 2023, BLM and the US Fish and Wildlife Service found that the Trump-era lease sale was "seriously flawed and based on a number of fundamental legal deficiencies." All nine of the previous leases were eventually canceled.

The American Petroleum Institute, the US' largest oil and gas industry lobby, continued to criticize Biden's leasing policy Dec. 9.

"The Biden administration continues to impede the development of oil and natural gas resources on federal lands despite clear economic and energy security benefits," API spokesperson Scott Lauermann said. "This lease offering represents the absolute minimum allowed under federal law and is less acreage than the leases BLM has cancelled over the past four years."

Policy swings again

Throughout his term Biden made Alaskan wilderness conservation a key pillar of his environmental agenda. While environmental groups harshly criticized his decision to approve ConocoPhillips' $8 billion Willow oil and gas project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, Biden also reversed several Trump-era orders encouraging the development of oil and gas production and mining in the state, winning conservation groups' praise.

In addition to canceling the previous leases, in April the administration closed 13 million acres in the NPR-A and denied a permit for the Ambler Road mining project, in which mining interests hoped to build a road through a national park to access a copper deposit. In August, Interior announced it would protect 28 million acres of public lands in Alaska, nearly 7% of the state's total land area, from oil, gas, or mineral extraction, arguing that consultation with local native tribes "must be treated as a requirement" in rulemaking. The Norton Bay Watershed Council cheered the decision, saying drilling would harm the wildlife the tribal subsistence economy depends on.

State and local groups have filed ongoing legal challenges to those rules. Alaska's two Republican Senators, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, have also criticized the Biden administration's approach, saying restrictions on resource development harm all Alaskans. At a May 8 hearing, Murkowski threatened to cut Interior's budget "until the department gets the point and returns to following the law and the balance that is reflected within it."

Trump remained a vocal supporter of increased oil production on the 2024 presidential campaign trail, frequently promising to "drill, baby, drill." He has specifically touted ANWR as the US' "biggest oil farm." Trump is widely considered likely to reverse many of Biden's environmental rules via executive order early in his second term, with a less restrictive leasing program for federal lands and waters chief among the oil industry's policy goals.

Still, no US oil majors bid on the leases in the first Trump-era sale, and industry appetite for potentially controversial or legally fraught projects in currently protected lands remains uncertain. The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Agency -- a state agency which owned seven of the nine previously canceled leases, with the other two owned by a small independent producer and a local real estate company -- has told S&P Global Commodity Insights it will submit offers for the new lease.