The U.S. Interior Department on Wednesday canceled seven oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that were part of a sale held in the waning days of the Trump administration, arguing the sale was legally flawed.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said with her decision to cancel the remaining leases “no one will have rights to drill for oil in one of the most sensitive landscapes on earth.” However, a 2017 law mandates another lease sale by late 2024. Administration officials said they intend to comply with the law.
Alaska political leaders have long pushed to allow oil and gas drilling on the refuge’s 1.5 million acre coastal plain, an area seen as sacred to the Indigenous Gwich’in because it is where caribou they rely on migrate and come to give birth. The state’s congressional delegation in 2017 succeeded in getting language added to a federal tax law that called for the U.S. government to hold two lease sales in the region by late 2024.
The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state corporation that won seven leases in the 2021 sale, sued over the moratorium but a federal judge recently found the delay by Interior to conduct a new review was not unreasonable.
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