The Biden administration released a long-awaited study Wednesday that recommends allowing major oil development on Alaska’s North Slope that supporters say could improve U.S. energy security, but climate activists call it a “carbon bomb.”
The move — though not the final one — drew immediate ire from environmentalists who saw it as a betrayal of the president’s pledge to reduce carbon emissions and promote clean energy sources.
ConocoPhillips Alaska has proposed five drilling sites as part of its Willow project, and the approach is listed as the preferred alternative by the US Bureau of Land Management in a report called up to the first three drilling sites. Even as the land agency released the report, the US Department of the Interior said in a separate statement that it had “significant concerns” about the project and the report’s preferred alternatives, “including direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions and impacts on wildlife and Alaska Natives’ subsistence.”
The Bureau of Land Management, which is in the Ministry of the Interior, also said in a report that identifies alternative options “not many commitments or decisions” and notes that they can choose different alternatives in the final decision.
Opponents have raised concerns about the impact of oil development on wildlife, such as caribou, and efforts to address climate change.
The project is located in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a vast area about the size of Indiana on the resource-rich North Slope of Alaska. ConocoPhillips Alaska said the project, at its peak, could produce about 180,000 barrels of oil per day.
The Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, an Alaska Native company, and the Iñupiat Community of the Arctic Slope joined the North Slope Borough in praising the proposed alternative and urging the administration to move forward with the project. In a joint statement, they said advancing the project “is essential to domestic energy independence, job security for Alaskans and the right of Alaska Natives to choose their own path.”
Other Alaska Native groups have expressed concerns.
Leaders of the Nuiqsut Indigenous Village and the town of Nuiqsut in the new letter said they don’t feel the Bureau of Land Management is listening. The community is about 36 miles (58 kilometers) from the Willow project, in a remote area of northern Alaska.
“The involvement of the Bureau of Land Management with us is constantly focused on how to keep the project moving forward; how to allow the continued expansion and concentration of oil and gas activities on our traditional lands,” Nuiqsut Village President Eunice Brower and Nuiqsut Mayor Rosemary Ahtuangaruak wrote in a letter dated last week.
ConocoPhillips has estimated that the project will create as many as 2,000 jobs during construction and 300 permanent jobs and generate between $8 billion and $17 billion in federal, state and local revenue in an area of more than 600 miles (965 kilometers) from Anchorage.
Erec Isaacson, president of ConocoPhillips Alaska, said in a statement that the company believes the project will “benefit local communities and improve America’s energy security while producing oil in an environmentally and socially responsible manner.” He said the review process “must be completed without further delay.”
Members of the Alaska congressional delegation – Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan and Rep. Mary Peltola, Democrat – all said they welcomed Wednesday’s environmental review and urged the administration to allow the project to move forward.
The project would bring miles of roads and hundreds of miles of pipelines into the region, disrupting animal migration patterns and destroying habitats if it goes ahead, said Earthjustice, an environmental group.
Jeremy Lieb, an attorney with the group, said Willow is currently the largest oil project proposed in the US. President Joe Biden campaigned on a promise to end new drilling on public lands and has set an ambitious goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.
Biden “will be remembered for what he did to address the climate crisis, and as it happens now, it’s not too late for him to step up and pull the plug on this carbon bomb,” Lieb said.
US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who opposed the Willow project as a member of Congress, has the final say on approving it, although top White House climate officials will be involved. Haaland has a variety of options, including direct approval or rejection or a central field that allows some drilling but blocks other developments. The final decision is expected no earlier than early March.
Federal agencies in the past week made two major decisions regarding resources in Alaska. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it was lifting restrictions on road building and logging in the nation’s largest national forest in southeast Alaska, the Tongass National Forest.
And on Tuesday, the US Environmental Protection Agency said it would use its veto authority under the federal Clean Water Act to block a proposed copper and gold mine in a mineral-rich region of southwest Alaska over environmental concerns. impact on Alaska’s rich aquatic ecosystem that supports the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery.
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