The Interior Department announced final steps to carry out an oil and gas lease sale off Alaska’s coast, just the second such offshore lease sale of President Joe Biden‘s tenure.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a subagency within the Interior Department that manages federal acreage in the outer continental shelf, issued a final notice of sale on Monday to auction off approximately 958,202 acres in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. The lease sale will be held on Dec. 30.
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Congress directed BOEM to carry out the Alaska lease sale by the end of the year after the Interior Department canceled it and two other Gulf of Mexico lease sales back in May. Interior said at the time that there was insufficient interest from the industry in the Cook Inlet sale.
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Cook Inlet and the two other Gulf lease sales were resurrected by the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ green energy and health spending bill that passed in August, at the insistence of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who supports the expansion of oil and gas development, unlike many Democrats in Congress.
The revived lease sales were ordered alongside other concessions Democratic leadership made to Manchin to secure his vote for the overall bill. The new law also makes the issuance of leases for renewable energy projects on federal lands contingent on regular oil and gas lease sales.
Biden entered office having made a number of promises to restrict or end the extraction of oil and gas on federal lands, and he followed through during his first week in office by ordering a pause on all new lease sales.
A federal court later enjoined the leasing pause, and the administration carried forward with its first offshore lease sale in November 2021.
