After a three-year push by the Trump administration to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling — an effort that culminated in a rush to sell leases before the White House changes hands — in the end the only taker may be the state of Alaska itself.
With a Thursday deadline for submitting bids for 10-year leases on tracts covering more than one million acres of the refuge, there is little indication that oil companies are interested in buying the rights to drill under difficult conditions, to extract more costly fossil fuels for a world that increasingly is seeking to wean itself off them.
Amid the uncertainty, a state-owned economic development corporation voted last week to authorize bidding up to $20 million for some of the leases. “It’s an extraordinary opportunity,” Frank Murkowski, an elder statesman of Alaska politics, told the board of the corporation, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, at a meeting before the vote.
There are legal questions surrounding the action, including whether the development authority qualifies as a bidder. And environmental organizations, some Alaska Native groups and others are seeking an injunction in Federal District Court to halt the lease sales outright, arguing that they are part of a deeply flawed process by the Interior Department that, among other things, played down scientific findings about possible damage to the refuge.
But if the development authority proceeds, it sets up the possibility that when the sealed bids are opened on Jan. 6, the state may find itself the sole owner of leases. That would leave it to hope that, at some point over the next decade, interest in drilling in the refuge picks up and it can sublease tracts to someone else.
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