Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan on Monday said he hopes that the Interior Department could begin opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 2019, ahead of the timeline expected by Congress.
“It is my hope, and this is a very aggressive timeline, that we would have the first [oil and natural gas] lease sale to be sometime in 2019,” the Republican lawmaker said during a panel discussion at the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston.
Sullivan said Interior Department officials are visiting the refuge, known as ANWR, in Alaska this week to scope opportunities for energy exploration.
ANWR was created under President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960. In 1980, Congress provided additional protections to the refuge but set aside a 1.5 million-acre section known as the “1002 area,” where billions of barrels of crude oil lie beneath the coastal plain, for study and future drilling if lawmakers approved it.
Republicans last year were successful in achieving their long-pursued goal to allow energy exploration in the area as part of their tax overhaul legislation.
Democrats and environmentalists say drilling would harm the ecosystem of what they describe as one of the wildest places left on earth, inhabited by animals such as polar bears, caribou, and arctic foxes
Republicans expect drilling in ANWR to raise $1 billion over a decade to help pay for tax reform, but Democrats contend that won’t happen, with low oil prices and steep competition from natural gas.
Under the tax law, the Interior Department must hold the first lease sale by 2021 and another by 2024, with at least 400,000 acres available each time.
But sales don’t necessarily translate to quick energy development.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said this week that drilling in ANWR is at least a decade away.
“It’s interesting … more often than not I heard people say, ‘I never thought it was going to happen in my lifetime,'” Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News in a story published Sunday. “But I remind people that just because we have the congressional permission” doesn’t mean production is imminent, she said.
“And for those who are saying, ‘OK, now the state is sitting just fine because we’ve got ANWR,’ well, that belies the reality… [It] is going to be another decade before we see production, and perhaps even a little bit longer,” she added.
