(Reuters) -The Biden administration will offer oil and gas drilling leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge at a sale on Jan. 9, the U.S. Interior Department said on Monday.
The agency will make 400,000 acres (161,874 hectares) available to drillers at the auction, the minimum required by a law that mandated the sale.
ANWR is a 19 million-acre refuge for species including polar bears and Porcupine caribou. The wild landscape lacks roads and public facilities, but its 1.6 million-acre coastal area along the Beaufort Sea is estimated to have up to 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
The Bureau of Land Management, the division of Interior that will oversee the sale, said the acreage on offer will avoid areas important to polar bear denning and caribou calving.
Alaska’s elected officials have sought for years to open drilling in the reserve to secure jobs and revenue for the state. The U.S. Congress opened up ANWR to oil and gas development as part of the 2017 tax bill.
U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican from Alaska, complained about the scale of the planned sale and said the administration was ignoring the will of Indigenous people who would benefit from oil and gas development in ANWR.
“The good news is we will soon be working with the Trump administration that, unlike Biden-Harris, has a proven track record of responsible oil and gas production and Alaska resource development, and respects the voices of the Iñupiat people of the North Slope,” Sullivan said in an emailed statement.
A native group, Voice of the Arctic Inupiat, said in a statement that the sale’s size undermined potential economic potential for the region.
Oil industry group the American Petroleum Institute also criticized the offering, though drillers largely failed to turn out four years ago for the first and only ANWR oil and gas auction.
The previous administration of President-elect Donald Trump sold oil and gas leases in ANWR in 2021, but the sale generated just $14.4 million in high bids, with an Alaska state agency as the sole bidder for most of the acreage sold.
Biden’s Interior Department canceled the leases in 2023, citing a flawed environmental analysis.
An Alaska-based environmental group said oil and gas development in ANWR would destroy an important ecosystem.
“The Arctic Refuge deserves to remain a place of refuge, not an industrial oilfield lining the pockets of big oil executives,” Kristen Miller, executive director of Alaska Wilderness League, said in a statement.
The 10-year leases will be sold for a minimum of $30 an acre. Companies that extract fuels on the leases will pay royalties of 16.67% to the U.S. government, according to a sale document.
Bids will be opened and read via a livestream on BLM’s website.
(Reporting by Nichola Groom in Los Angeles; Editing by Rod Nickel, Deepa Babington and Matthew Lewis)
