The Biden administration announced Tuesday it is suspending all leases to drill oil and gas in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
It’s the latest step by the Interior Department to overturn a trademark effort from Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration to start the first drilling program in a small section of the 19.3 million-acre refuge, known as the “1002 area,” where billions of barrels of oil are believed to lie beneath the coastal plain.
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The Trump administration, eager to deliver on a mandate from the 2017 Republican tax cut bill, conducted the first lease sale in early January, just weeks before President Joe Biden was inaugurated. But it produced a disappointing result.
An economic development corporation owned by Alaska offered the high bid on all but two of the 11 leases sold, which generated a paltry total of $14.4 million. No large public oil companies made bids, because of a combination of low prices from the pandemic and the fact that investors concerned about exposure to climate change financial risks, including several U.S. banks, have vowed not to fund Arctic drilling.
The GOP tax cut bill called for a second lease sale before 2024.
The Interior Department’s order, citing “legal deficiencies” in the Trump administration’s environmental review of the leasing program, calls for a temporary moratorium on all activities related to leases that have already been granted pending a new analysis.
Interior will then determine whether the leases should be reaffirmed, voided, or subject to additional environmental mitigation measures.
“President Biden is grateful for the prompt action by the Department of the Interior to suspend all leasing pending a review of decisions made in the last administration’s final days that could have changed the character of this special place forever,” said White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy in a statement Tuesday.
But it’s legally dubious whether Biden could cancel the leases if it decides they were granted illegally.
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who led a decadeslong quest to allow drilling in the refuge to boost her oil-dependent state, said in a statement that the Biden administration does not have the “discretion” to suspend the leases, given the drilling program was permitted in legislation passed by Congress.
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, pledged to “use every means necessary to undo this egregious federal overreach.”
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Biden has repeatedly vowed to ban drilling in ANWR, declaring himself “totally opposed” to disturbing the status quo in a long off-limits area that environmentalists consider to be one of the wildest places left on Earth.
