Arctic Refuge Oil and Gas Lease Sale Receives No Bids

The U.S. Interior Department on Jan. 8 announced that the Bureau of Land Management received zero bids for the government authorized oil and gas lease sale for the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Arctic Refuge), following the bid submission deadline of Jan. 6.

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act directed the bureau to conduct two sales in the Coastal Plain offering at least 400,000 acres of high-potential hydrocarbon lands for bid by 2024. The department said that the Tax Cut law unlocked the energy potential of the Coastal Plain area after 30 years of gridlock. The law called for a competitive energy development program which could keep the oil flowing in the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline, bringing jobs and economic growth to the state. The state is also expected to play a more important role in enhancing the nation’s energy security.

The expired deadline was the second government mandated sale, with the first sale also showing low interest, yielding a total of $14.4 million in high bids on 11 tracts. Congress incorporated the two lease sales in the Tax Act on the basis that the sales would make around $2 billion in revenue over a 10-year period.

Two out of the nine leases sold during the previous administration’s sale were cancelled and reimbursed at the request of the leaseholders, while the other seven held by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, were negated by U.S. Interior Department Secretary Deb Haaland due to a number of legal shortcomings in the underlying record. As it stands, there are no existing leases in the Coastal Plain. The Biden administration cancelled the agency’s seven leases during 2023. The Biden administration states that the department under the Trump administration did not undertake comprehensive environmental analysis for the leasing program under the National Environmental Policy Act, among other failings.