Biden cancels Alaska oil leases, protects millions of acres in Arctic Refuge

The Biden Administration and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland have canceled seven oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska, along with protecting 13 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve.

ANWR is one of the largest areas of pristine wildlife habitat in America and is home to indigenous peoples. But it also sits atop around ten billion barrels of oil, and thus, for decades, Republicans and oil companies have been trying to drill in it.

For the most part, these attempts were refused until 2017. At that time, a Republican Congress passed – and Mr. Trump signed – a bill giving huge tax breaks to the wealthy, adding $1.5 trillion to the deficit and raising taxes on the middle class. However, this tax bill also opened up 1.5 million acres in ANWR to oil drilling.

On January 6, 2021 (yes, that January 6), the US government held a rushed oil and gas lease sale and issued 10-year leases on 430,000 acres. But 15 days later, on President Biden’s first day in office, he issued an executive order suspending those leases, stating that they did not undergo proper environmental review.

Today’s action permanently cancels those suspended leases, finding that they did not undergo proper review under the National Environmental Policy Act. However, two of the three purchasers had already requested that their leases be canceled and refunded, and the only remaining holder of these leases was the state of Alaska itself.

In addition to canceling the leases, the Department of the Interior will now give maximum protection to 13 million acres within the 23.6 million acre National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska (NPRA), which sits to the west of ANWR. And it will prohibit any new leasing on 10.6 million acres, over 40% of the NPRA’s total area.

The newly protected areas are listed as “Special Areas,” a designation afforded to “areas with significant surface value” within the NPRA. Here’s a map showing them in Northwest Alaska:

This news comes months after Biden approved the “Willow project,” a large oil project within the NPRA, a move opposed by people who would prefer the planet to remain livable rather than turn into a burning hellscape in the name of oil industry profits. Today’s action does not reverse that approval – Willow will be allowed to continue as planned.

Electrek’s Take

Biden has been getting a lot of flack from environmentalists for allowing oil & gas lease sales, and this flack is deserved. If we want to avoid climate change, we have absolutely zero options other than keeping oil in the ground where it belongs. If we allowed all currently owned and explored oil reserves to be drilled and burned, we would overshoot necessary carbon targets by around 4x (see Bill McKibben’s excellent article “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” about this).

That said – and this has not been a popular take among environmentalists (of which I am one) – I never found these oil leases to be all that disturbing. Because I kind of thought they would (or at least must) eventually be canceled, likely before they got very far into construction. And they did. So that’s good.

The government has been holding plenty of oil and gas lease sales lately, even while touting historic climate actions. This is dumb, and they shouldn’t hold these leases. However, we’ve also seen instances of companies not bothering to show up to purchase these leases, and all major US banks have given up on funding Arctic oil leases anyway. Everyone knows the oil companies have more than enough leases already and probably won’t ever be able to use them all – at least if the health of the planet matters to anyone (jury’s out on that one).

So these lease sales are kind of a waste of time for everyone involved, in my opinion. Instead of spending time leasing and unleasing land, we should work harder on protecting more of it. This is a good start, but I’d like to see more leases canceled – even on land that’s already being used for production, like Los Angeles wants to do.