On January 8, 2025, the Department of the Interior announced that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) received no bids for the second congressionally mandated federal oil and gas lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
This week’s lease sale offered 400,000 acres of federal land for oil and gas development in the Arctic Refuge, as required by law. The deadline to submit bids was January 6, 2025. While BLM had planned to announce winning bids on January 10, 2025, the absence of any bids means the lease sale has concluded without action.
In response to this announcement, TCS Vice President Autumn Hanna issued the following statement:
Taxpayers were sold a bill of goods when Congress authorized drilling in the Arctic Refuge. The industry isn’t interested, the revenue promises were wildly inflated, and the risks and costs of pursuing this program continue to pile up. It’s time to save taxpayers the headache and shut the door on Arctic leasing once and for all.
The dismal outcome of this lease sale is no surprise. Since the Arctic Refuge Leasing Program was enacted in 2017, the oil and gas industry has shown little interest in the region due to high costs and poor prospects for development.
The first lease sale in the Arctic Refuge was also a failure for taxpayers. Only two private companies and a state-backed Alaskan entity acquired leases, and the sale raised less than 1% of the $1 billion in new revenue that was promised when the program was authorized. Today’s results make it clear: any future leasing in the Arctic Refuge will likely yield the same disappointing outcomes for taxpayers.
Background
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is the largest refuge within the National Wildlife Refuge System. In the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Congress authorized a federal program to manage the “leasing, development, production, and transportation of oil and gas in and from the Coastal Plain” of the Arctic Refuge, an area that contains approximately 1.5 million acres of non-Wilderness federal land. Specifically, Congress required the Department of the Interior (DOI) to hold an initial lease sale by December 22, 2021, and a second lease sale by December 22, 2024, with each sale offering at least 400,000 acres.
The ANWR oil and gas program was proposed as a revenue raiser to offset the 2017 tax bill’s $1.9 trillion price tag. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) originally estimated that the two lease sales would generate $1.82 billion in total over 10 years, resulting in $910 million in federal revenue as half would be shared with the state of Alaska. However, actual revenue from the first oil and gas lease sale was less than 1 percent of what Congress and the CBO promised, generating just $16.5 million in total revenue.
In 2022, the only 2 private companies that acquired leases requested to rescind their leases in 2022. Major U.S. banks—including Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, and Chase—and insurance companies—including Chubb—have also announced they will no longer finance or insure oil businesses in the Arctic Refuge. In September 2023, the DOI rescinded the seven remaining leases in ANWR due to serious flaws and legal deficiencies in the previous Administration’s environmental analysis.
On December 9, 2024, DOI announced that it would hold the second congressionally mandated Arctic Refuge oil and gas lease sale in January 2025. The lease sale offered 400,000 acres of federal land—the congressionally mandated minimum—for oil and gas development. The area only included the acres projected to have a high potential for oil and gas resources, much of which was originally leased in the January 2021 lease sale but later rescinded.
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