Trump’s Permitting For Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Drilling Is A Test

If Americans can stop this administration’s pillage anywhere, it’s going to begin on the north slope

Last week, the Trump administration announced that it’s opening all 1.5 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain to oil drilling. Should that plan prove successful, it will condemn one of the nineteen populations of polar bears that remain globally to extinction, threaten a massive herd of caribou on which Indigenous people rely, further accelerate climate change, and spoil the largest tract of wilderness remaining in America. It’s also the best opportunity the American people currently have to stop the administration’s destruction of our natural resources.

At 19.3 million acres, ANWR is the largest wildlife refuge in the entire country and our biggest slice of intact, undeveloped wilderness. It’s home to polar bears, caribou, muskox, and all manner of migratory birds. It also holds oil. Somewhere between 4.25 and 11.8 billion barrels, according to the Bureau of Land Management, which is in charge of the area. The entire United States used 7.39 billion barrels of oil in 2023.

All of that oil is located on ANWR’s coastal plain, which also provides denning habitat for the Southern Beaufort Sea polar bear population. Areas suitable for drilling correspond to directly with polar bear denning sites.

I’m speeding through all this because I’ve written extensively about the impacts drilling will have on ANWRs polar bears, and the challenges inherent to extracting oil in ANWR before. I encourage you to open those links if you’d like deeper information on either topic.

The Department of the Interior, which oversees BLM, is reinstating bids made for oil leases in ANWR back in January 2021, which were cancelled by the Biden administration in 2023. DOI will also now hold four additional lease sales across the next seven years.

Why is this happening now? In order to locate drills within the nine lease sites that were sold in 2021, oil developers will need to conduct seismic surveys. That process involves sending high pressure vibrations into the ground, at 135 foot intervals. To conduct that process, teams of 150 to 160 workers living in mobile camps must move heavy equipment over virtually every inch of the survey area using 90,000-pound trucks. And that process must occur in the winter, when the frozen ground can support the weight of those vehicles.

During the winter, polar bears retreat from the sea ice to burrow into the snow and give birth to cubs. Those den sites are vulnerable to being crushed by industrial equipment driving over them. And while mother bears will often flee as those trucks approach, the newborn cubs will be killed. In order to prevent that, surveys are conducted from the air using infrared sensors to locate the dens, which are then given a mile-wide exclusion area. But, a team from Polar Bears International found that, even in ideal conditions, those surveys were successful at locating dens only 50 to 67 percent of the time.

More than any other keystone species, polar bears are directly threatened by climate change. The species is reliant on sea ice in order to hunt seals, its primary food source. As warming temperatures reduce areas of the arctic covered by ice, polar bears lose their ability to hunt for food. It’s the goal of polar bear conservation efforts to maintain populations to the greatest extent possible until such a time as global warming can be reversed, and areas of sea ice restored. By killing cubs, disturbing mothers, and displacing bears, industrial operations in ANWR threaten to speed polar bears towards extinction by reducing or potentially eliminating one of only two populations that exist in the United States.

At the same time, a study conducted by Yale researchers found that drilling ANWR would result in $2,000 (inflation adjusted) in environmental and health harm to each and every American citizen over the age of 18.

For those reasons, and because of advocacy lead by the region’s Gwich’in people, many organizations involved in or necessary for arctic oil exploration have publicly stated that they won’t participate in ANWR drilling. This limits the ability for any project in the area to find insurance, finance, or even markets for its oil. As a result, no major oil companies participated in that 2021 lease sale. It raised only $14.4 million, nearly all of that from the state-owned Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority.

DOI is likely making this announcement now in order to enable AIDEA to begin planning seismic surveys this winter.

Adjusted for today’s pricing, ANWR is thought to hold about $434 billion of accessible oil. But, a 2005 study estimated it would cost around $202 billion to extract that oil, adjusted for inflation. Because ANWR is so remote, and has no existing infrastructure, it’s estimated that it would take at least 10 years of road construction, pipeline building and other development until the first drop of oil could be extracted. And assuming full-scale development of drilling infrastructure across the coastal plane, that oil would last 19 years.

It’s not clear whether or not major banks and insurers will now be willing to reverse their previous position, and participate in the development of ANWR. But even assuming they might now be, and even assuming Trump is somehow able to take a third term in the White House, any investment in ANWR drilling will not be able to return a profit for two to three decades, by which time we will definitely have a new administration. So any calculation of risk around the hundreds of billions of dollars in investment it would take to drill ANWR must recognize how uncertain the regulatory picture is across that timeline.

Trump himself is not making things any easier for oil companies. As even oil executives in Texas are starting to complain about, the President of the United States is working with foreign oil producers in an attempt to drive down the price of oil, which is currently $61.50/barrel—marginal for the ability for any production in America to turn a profit. Trump’s goal is to get that to $40 by next year’s mid-terms.

How does that impact ANWR drilling? Well, it’s going to be so expensive to build all that infrastructure that operations there would not be able to turn a profit until such a time as oil reaches $102-a-barrel.

At the same time, Republicans in Congress recently pushed BLM permitting off a regulatory cliff. By shifting the agency’s Resource Management Plans into a legal category that must be approved by Congress itself, those Republican legislators have called into question the legality of any operations in ANWR which, along with any other planning done on public lands since 1996, will now be the subject of protracted legal battles. The scale of that chaos will tie all permitting up in court for years, overwhelming not only the federal court system, but the capacity of private companies, federal agencies, and all other stakeholders to seek judicial resolutions.

All of this is to say that while we should take this administration’s attempts to destroy ANWR’s fragile environment seriously, we should not underestimate our ability to prevent that from happening. I spelled out the program for doing just that in this article. Add to that the newfound ability for literally anyone to sue over the legality of any permitting that’s part of any plan written since 1996, along with the financial harm to each and every American already established by that Yale study.

In a worst case scenario, even if those seismic surveys do begin in some limited form this winter, we have 10 years from that time to stop development before oil production can begin. In a best case scenario, development will simply be prevented from occurring by the factors I’ve explained above, even if some leases are sold at firesale prices across the remainder of Trump’s time in office.

If we can beat this administration anywhere, it’s in ANWR. And doing so will likely cause a chilling effect for the development of any other projects that are part of the administration’s attempts to destroy our environment. It’s up up to all of us to see that through.

Top photo: Outward Bound / Creative Commons

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