No bids in ANWR lease sale set for Jan. 10. Trump will roll out new terms

A new act in the ongoing drama of oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, will be playing out.

No bids were received by the bid deadline for the latest action, a planned federal lease sale set for Friday in ANWR’s Coastal Plain, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced Jan. 8. Monday, Jan. 6 was the deadline for bids to be received.

“The expired deadline to submit bids concludes the second congressionally-mandated sale required by the 2017 Tax Act, which directed the BLM to hold two lease sales in the Coastal Plain,” of the refuge, the Interior Department said in a press release.

The first lease sale under the Tax Act was held in 2021, with modest results.

While the sale of 400,000 acres in the second ANWR sale was planned for Friday, and is now off, this sets the stage for a new effort to lease tracts in the refuge under incoming President Donald Trump. More will be coming on ANWR.

The lack of bids, or at best light bidding, was expected had the sale been held because of terms and stipulations for the leases laid on by Interior Department under Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.

While Congress mandated that two sales be held in the 2017 Tax Act, which passed in 2019 under Trump’s first term as president, the terms for the sale were set by Haaland under the Biden administration, which took the reins of the government in 2020.

When Trump comes back into office Jan. 20 he is expected to push Congress, where both the Senate and U.S. House are Republican-controlled, to extend the 2017 tax act.

That will create an opportunity Trump and Alaska’s congressional delegation to set new requirement for leasing. A new Interior Department management under Trump will likely set more industry-friendly terms for a new sale.

There could be questions on whether that can be done, and a sale held, in the four years Trump will have in office, because a new Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement may be required and there will surely be lawsuits files by conservation groups.

Had the sale been held on Friday the 400,000 acres offered was the minimum acreage required to be offered under the Tax Act, and stipulations proposed for any leases sold would have restricted seismic work and surface disturbance in ways that would make drilling and development problematic, according to Alaska sources familiar with ANWR.

An additional twist is that there is pending litigation by a state of Alaska agency that bid for leases in the first required ANWR lease sale held in 2021. The Interior Department, under Haaland, cancelled those leases, which is being contested in court by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA, the agency involved.

AIDEA’s lawsuit claims Haaland acted illegally in cancelling the leases, which are in the same area that would have been offered for lease on Jan. 10. A litigation cloud complicating new leasing would have further discouraged bidding.

Although ANWR is being touted by Trump and others as having huge oil potential industry has actually shown little interest in recent years. There were just a handful of bids in the 2021 lease, most of them from AIDEA, the state agency.

Most geologists believe the Coastal Plain of ANWR, a 1.5 million-acre part of the refuge near the Arctic coast, does have potential for new oil and gas discoveries because finds have been made on state-owned lands to the west including the large Prudhoe Bay field. A large gas and condensate find was also discovered at Point Thomson, also on state lands but a short distance west of the border of the federally-owned ANWR.

The toxic politics over ANWR leasing and exploration over several decades – conservation groups have fiercely opposed drilling – has likely discouraged interest by industry, although BP and Chevron showed some interest in the 1980s and drilled an exploration well on lands adjacent to the refuge owned by Alaska Native corporations. The results of that well are still confidential.