According to two people briefed on the administration’s strategy, the Biden administration is suspending oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as it assesses the environmental effects of fracking in the remote area that has been the subject of decades of political debate.
The order from the Interior Department was expected to be released later Tuesday. It comes after President Joe Biden placed a temporary ban on oil and gas lease operations on his first day in office. Biden’s executive order from January 20 indicated that a new environmental analysis was required to correct potential legal loopholes in a fracking policy approved by the Trump administration under a 2017 law passed by Congress.
Since the proposal had not been publicly announced, those briefed on it requested anonymity.
Polar bears, caribou, snowy owls, and other animals, as well as migrating birds from six continents, call the 19.6 million-acre refuge home. Republicans and the oil industry have long sought to drill in the wildlife sanctuary, which the Indigenous Gwich’in regard as sacred. Democrats, environmentalists, and several Alaska Native tribes have all attempted to stop it.
On Jan.6, two weeks before Biden took office, the US Bureau of Land Management, an Interior Department agency, conducted a lease sale for the refuge’s coastal plain. The agency signed leases for nine tracts covering nearly 685 square miles eight days later (1,770 square kilometers). However, former President Donald Trump did not officially disclose the leases’ issuance until January 19.
Biden has spoken out against fracking in the region, and environmentalists have pushed for permanent safeguards, which Biden advocated for during his presidential campaign.
The suspension of the leases comes after administration officials frustrated environmental activists last week when they defended a Trump administration decision to approve a major oil project on Alaska’s North Slope. Critics argue that the decision contradicts Biden’s promises to fix climate change.
In a court filing, the Justice Department claimed that critics of the Willow project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska were attempting to halt construction by “cherry-picking” federal agency documents to report environmental review law violations. The filing defends the assessments that led to the approval of project plans last fall.
A consortium of organisations has filed a lawsuit to overturn Trump’s approval. Earlier this year, an appeals court suspended some building operations, and the parties in the case later decided to hold the restrictions in effect until December 1 while the underlying case was still being heard.
