One of President-elect Donald Trump’s biggest “drill, baby, drill” initiatives suffered a significant setback Wednesday as the Interior Department announced that a lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ended without a single bidder.
The sale, which was required by Congress, marks the second time in four years that an effort to auction oil and gas leases in the pristine wilderness — home to migrating caribou, polar bears, musk oxen, millions of birds and other wildlife — has been a flop.
The repeated failures suggest that oil companies are either not interested in drilling in the refuge or do not think it’s worth the cost, despite insistence by Trump and many Republican lawmakers that the refuge should be opened up for drilling. The Biden administration offered 400,000 acres after shaving off 1 million acres from the original boundaries to avoid areas crucial to the polar bear and Porcupine caribou populations.
“The lack of interest from oil companies in development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge reflects what we and they have known all along: There are some places too special and sacred to exploit with oil and gas drilling,” Laura Daniel-Davis, the acting deputy secretary of the Interior Department, said in a statement.
Some Alaska lawmakers and officials, including the governor, had said before the sale that the decision by the Biden administration to shrink the leasing area would guarantee failure. Republican lawmakers have said that the wilderness area would generate a multibillion-dollar windfall as soon as drillers were allowed inside the refuge.
But Daniel-Davis noted that the oil and gas industry is “sitting on millions of acres of undeveloped leases elsewhere” and should pursue those first. “We’d suggest that’s a prudent place to start, rather than engage further in speculative leasing in one of the most spectacular places in the world,” she said.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is an expanse of roughly 19 million acres along the North Slope of Alaska. It’s one of the last truly wild places in the United States. It also includes land considered sacred by the Gwich’in, an Alaska Native group.
Several major banks have said they would not finance any projects in the refuge. Drilling there would be difficult and costly because there are no roads or facilities.
But for Trump, the refuge is a field of dreams. He has called it “the biggest find anywhere in the world, as big as Saudi Arabia” and on the campaign trail he frequently assailed President Joe Biden’s efforts to protect the wild area. On Tuesday, Trump said drilling in the expanse remained one of his top energy priorities and pledged that extracting its “liquid gold” would help bring down the price of gasoline and groceries.
“We’re going to be opening up ANWR,” he said, using the acronym for the refuge. “We’re going to be doing all sorts of things that nobody thinks is possible.”
Democrats and Republicans have fought over the question of drilling in the Alaskan wilderness for half a century. Drilling in the refuge was barred in 1980. That ban ended with a 2017 tax bill that Congress passed and Trump signed into law in his first term. He frequently takes credit for opening the refuge.
“I got it done,” Trump said at a rally in October. “Ronald Reagan couldn’t get it done. Nobody could get it done. I got it done.”
Republicans passed legislation that required two lease sales in ANWR to be held by 2024. They predicted the leases would generate $2 billion in royalties over 10 years. Half would go to the state of Alaska, and the other half would help to pay for Trump’s tax cuts.
Two weeks before Trump left office in 2021, the Interior Department held the first auction. It was a dud.
Alaska’s state-owned economic development corporation was the only bidder on nine of the tracts offered for lease in the northernmost section of the refuge, and half of the offered leases drew no bids at all. The Interior Department reported that the auction yielded a total of $14.4 million in bids.
After Biden took office, his administration suspended the leases, saying the Interior Department had not sufficiently analyzed the impact that drilling would have in the environmentally sensitive region. Then, leases sold in the 2021 auction were forfeited, relinquished or canceled by the Biden administration.
The new environmental review, issued in November, recommended additional protections for wildlife, waterways and permafrost. It called for restricting leases to the northern and western part of the plain, areas not used by the Porcupine caribou herd.
In the sale conducted this week, the Biden administration offered 400,000 acres, the minimum amount required by law. The deadline to submit bids was Jan. 6.
The state of Alaska on Monday sued the Biden administration over the size of the lease area, saying it made the area economically unviable for oil drilling. If Alaska is successful in its lawsuit, the Trump administration could potentially redo the sale and offer more land.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, wrote in a post on social media that the Biden administration “cloaked its latest sanction on Alaska as a lease sale in ANWR,” which is “designed to fail” and part of an anti-energy “nightmare” for the state.
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said the latest failed lease sale was not a surprise and accused the Biden administration of trying to “shut down any chance of developing” the refuge by closing off three-quarters of the available land. He said the Trump administration would have greater success.
Environmentalists said the failures exposed false promises made by Republicans about a boon to the U.S. Treasury if the refuge were opened to drilling.
Erik Grafe, an Alaska-based attorney with Earthjustice, said oil companies “seem to understand that drilling in this remote landscape is too risky, too complicated and just plain wrong.”
He said environmental groups would fight any attempt by the Trump administration to hold new lease sales in the refuge.
• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
