The plan fulfills a promise by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans to open this portion of the refuge to possible development.
The Trump administration on Thursday finalized plans to open the coastal plain of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to potential oil and gas drilling, renewing a long-simmering debate over whether to drill in one of the nation’s environmental jewels.
U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the decision Thursday that paves the way for future lease sales within the refuge’s 1.5 million-acre coastal plain, an area that’s considered sacred by the Indigenous Gwich’in. The plan fulfills pledges made by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans to reopen this portion of the refuge to possible development. Trump’s bill of tax breaks and spending cuts, passed during the summer, called for at least four lease sales within the refuge over a 10-year period.
Burgum was joined in Washington, D.C., by Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy and the state’s congressional delegation for this and other lands-related announcements, including the department’s decision to restore oil and gas leases in the refuge that had been canceled by the prior administration.
A federal judge in March said the Biden administration lacked authority to cancel the leases, which were held by a state corporation that was the major bidder in the first-ever lease sale for the refuge held at the end of Trump’s first term.
Leaders in Indigenous Gwich’in communities near the refuge consider the coastal plain sacred, noting its importance to a caribou herd they rely upon, and they oppose drilling there.
