White House moves to sell oil rights
In a last- minute push to achieve its long- sought goal of allowing oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, the Trump administration Monday announced that it would begin the formal process of selling leases to oil companies.
That sets up a potential sale of leases just before Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, leaving the new administration of Joe Biden, who has opposed drilling in the refuge, to try to stop them after the fact.
“The Trump administration is trying a ‘ Hail Mary’ pass,” said
Jenny Rowland- Shea, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal group in Washington. “They know that what they’ve put out there is rushed and legally dubious.”
The Federal Register on Monday posted a “call for nominations” from the Bureau of Land Management, to be officially published Tuesday, relating to lease sales in about 1.5 million acres of the refuge along the coast of the Arctic Ocean. A call for nominations is essentially a request to oil companies to specify which tracts of land they would be interested in exploring and potentially drilling for oil and gas.
The American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, said it welcomed the move. In a statement, the organization said that development in the refuge was “long overdue and will create good- paying jobs and provide a new revenue stream for the state — which is why a majority of Alaskans support it.”
The call for nominations will allow 30 days for comments, after which the bureau, part of the Interior Department, could issue a final notice of sales to occur as soon as 30 days later. That means the sales could be held a few days before Inauguration Day.
Normally the bureau would take time to review the comments and determine which tracts to sell before issuing the final notice of sale, a process that can take several months. In this case, however, the bureau could decide to offer all of the acreage and issue the notice immediately.
There was no immediate response to emailed requests for comment from the Interior Department or the Bureau of Land Management office in Alaska.
Any sales would then be subject to review by agencies in the Biden administration, including the bureau and the Justice Department, a process that could take a month or two. That could allow the
Biden White House to refuse to issue the leases, perhaps by claiming that the scientific underpinnings of the plan to allow drilling in the refuge were flawed, as environmental groups have claimed.
At stake is the future of the refuge, one of the most remote and pristine parts of the United States and home to polar bears and migrating caribou, among other wildlife. In 2017, in a reversal of decades of protections, the Trump administration and the Republican- controlled Congress opened the refuge’s coastal plain to potential oil and gas development.