Trump moves to sell oil rights in Arctic Refuge. The lease sales could occur just before Inauguration Day.
The Trump administration announced Monday it would begin selling oil leases for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
The Trump administration announced Monday it would begin selling oil leases for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
Credit…Christopher Miller for The New York Times
In a last-minute push to achieve its long-sought goal of allowing oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, the Trump administration on Monday announced that it would begin the formal process of selling leases to oil companies.
The lease sales could occur just before Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, leaving the new administration of Joseph R. Biden Jr. — who has opposed drilling in the refuge — to try to reverse them after the fact.
“The Trump administration is trying a ‘Hail Mary’ pass,” said Jenny Rowland-Shea, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal group in Washington. “They know that what they’ve put out there is rushed and legally dubious.”
The Federal Register on Monday posted a “call for nominations” from the Bureau of Land Management, to be officially published Tuesday, relating to lease sales in about 1.5 million acres of the refuge along the coast of the Arctic Ocean. A call for nominations is essentially a request to oil companies to specify which tracts of land they would be interested in exploring and potentially drilling for oil and gas.
The call will allow 30 days for comments, after which the bureau, part of the Interior Department, could issue a final notice of sales to occur as soon as 30 days later.
There was no immediate response to emailed requests for comment from the Interior Department or the Bureau of Land Management office in Alaska.
Any sales would then be subject to review by agencies in the Biden administration, including the bureau and the Justice Department, a process that could take a month or two. That could allow the Biden White House to refuse to issue the leases, perhaps by claiming that the scientific underpinnings of the plan to allow drilling in the refuge were flawed, as environmental groups have claimed.
— Henry Fountain The New York Times