The Trump administration took a final step Thursday toward selling leases for companies to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, releasing a finding that energy development would have minimal environmental impact.
The Interior Department hopes to conduct a lease sale by the end of the year, after releasing an environmental impact statement assessing the risks of drilling in a 1.5 million-acre section of the refuge, known as the “1002 area,” where billions of barrels of oil are believed to lie beneath the coastal plain.
“After rigorous review, robust public comment, and a consideration of a range of alternatives, today’s announcement is a big step to carry out the clear mandate we received from Congress to develop and implement a leasing program for the Coastal Plain, a program the people of Alaska have been seeking for over 40 years,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in a statement.
The Interior Department released the review on the same day the Democratically-controlled House voted mostly on partisan lines to bar drilling in the wildlife refuge. The House bill won’t be considered by the Republican-controlled Senate, but the legislation sought to reverse a provision in the 2017 Republican tax bill that repealed a long-time ban on energy development in the wildlife refuge.
An Interior official told reporters on a press call that its release of the environmental review was not timed to distract from the House vote.
“The timing is the timing,” said Chad Padgett, the Alaska state director of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management. “We are rolling along as normal with what the [GOP tax] law says rather than focusing on what the House vote was.”
Actual drilling wouldn’t happen for 10 to 15 years even with a lease sale this year, and it’s uncertain how interested energy companies would be in the opportunity, with low oil prices and competition steep from booming oil and gas in the nation’s lower 48 shale regions.
But Democrats and environmental groups have accused the Trump administration of rushing the environmental review and leasing process before the 2020 election, when a Democrat could win the White House and block the planned sales.
“This sham ‘review’ unlawfully opens the entire coastal plain to leasing and fails to minimize damage to this unique environment,” said Garett Rose, staff attorney for the Alaska Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Under the tax law, the Interior Department must hold the first lease sale by 2021 and another by 2024, and offer up at least 400,000 acres each time.
But the Interior Department is moving ahead of the timeline outlined in the law, completing its environmental review in half the time normally spent for ecologically sensitive areas, critics say.
A coalition of 16 Democratic state attorneys general filed comments in March saying Interior’s draft environmental review failed to adequately account for the potential impact from drilling in the wildlife refuge on climate change and address mitigation measures to protect polar bears, caribou, migratory birds, and arctic foxes.
