The Bureau of Land Management has offered the minimum possible amount of land in a mandatory lease sale for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in keeping with the Biden administration’s efforts to minimize drilling in the area.
The BLM offered 400,000 acres in the lease sale, which represents a quarter of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plane. The acreage will be tendered in early January.
“The area offered for sale will avoid important polar bear denning and Porcupine Caribou Herd calving areas,” the BLM said in the news release on its decision. “This also has the smallest footprint of potential surface disturbance due to No Surface Occupancy stipulations, and limits seismic exploration to the areas available for leasing.”
Local native communities, however, were not happy with the BLM’s decision and criticized the limited amount of acreage put up for leasing.
“It seems that once again the people of the North Slope are being told that our voices and lived experience are insufficient, and that federal laws passed by Congress mean little in the eyes of the Biden administration’s Department of the Interior (DOI),” the mayor of the North Slope Borough, Josiah Patkotak said in comments on the BLM’s decision.
With this latest development, DOI has soundly rejected the opportunity to partner in our effort to aptly balance development and preservation in our region. This administration has moved beyond ignoring our appeals to now seeking to remove us from the picture entirely,” he added.
Local communities are, perhaps somewhat surprisingly in light of Native community protests against oil projects, in favor of more oil development.
“Though our communities welcome the potential for a successful lease sale, we are clear eyed about the administration’s intent and flawed process that got us here,” the president of a local activist group, Voice of the Arctic Inupiat, said, as quoted by the Alaska Beacon. “This final ROD and notice of a lease sale is a deliberate attempt by the Biden administration’s Interior Department to kneecap the potential of development in ANWR.”
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com