Arctic lease sale attracts bids from only two companies

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - The Trump administration’s oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Friday attracted bids on only five tracts of land from two companies.

The Bureau of Land Management offered 58 tracts across approximately 688,829 acres for the sale. The five tracts bid on covered 72,049 acres.

Hex Energy LLC and the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a corporation by the state, were the two companies to make bids. The $3.7 million in revenue from the sale will be split 50-50 between the state and the federal government.

“The strong industry interest we saw today reflects confidence in Alaska’s resource potential and the Trump administration’s commitment to providing certainty for investment,” said BLM Director Steve Pearce in a statement. “These leases will help create jobs, generate significant revenue for Alaska and the nation and support the reliable domestic energy production Americans depend on every day.”

Environmental groups in Alaska characterized the sale as a “flop” and a “failure” due to the lack of interest and low number of tracts bid on.

“This stunning yet predictable failure shows that drilling in this pristine landscape is a dead end for the fossil fuel industry,” said Cooper Freeman, Alaska Biological Diversity Center director, in a statement.

“The Trump administration needs to finally accept reality, listen to the American people and leave the Arctic Refuge alone.”

A spokesperson for EarthJustice criticized the sale as another blow to crucial polar bear habitat, saying the leasing poses “significant threats to habitat, iconic wildlife, and Indigenous ways of life” to the refuge.

“Drilling in the Arctic Refuge is reckless, and the market keeps confirming it,” Bobby McEnaney, director of land conservation at the Natural Resources Defense Council, stated in an EarthJustice press release.

“It is a remote, fragile landscape that is expensive to drill and risky to bet on, and no amount of pressure from Washington changes that. We should not be putting this delicate habitat on the line for an oil patch that does not exist.”

Raena Garcia, senior energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said in the same release that the lease sale will cause “irreversible damage” to Alaska’s Arctic region.

“We must not sacrifice Coastal Plain to Big Oil in the face of a climate catastrophe,” Garcia said.

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