Trump set stage for ANWR leasing flop
One of the biggest puzzles of the Trump administration was why there was no lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge during the years that Trump was in charge.
It was only after he lost the election in November 2020 that the Interior Department hurriedly threw a sale together for Jan. 6, 2021, a day that will be long remembered for the riot in the Capitol, not for the ANWR lease sale flop.
Congress had approved a lease sale in 2017 and Trump immediately began to boast that he had achieved something that Ronald Reagan couldn’t accomplish. He said it was only after an unnamed “friend” told him that Reagan had failed that Trump got interested.
“I really didn't care about it, and then when I heard that everybody wanted it for 40 years they'd been trying to get it approved, I said, 'Make sure you don't lose ANWR.'"
Sen. Dan Sullivan, who still never criticizes Trump, said the president was only pretending to be uninformed about the details of the refuge.
On Dec. 17, 2017, the day that he signed the giant GOP tax cut, Trump first told the story about his alleged ANWR friend at a press conference attended by Sullivan, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Rep. Don Young and other GOP members of Congress.
"We've been trying to get that passed, the whole country, the world,” said Trump, quoting his friend. “They tried in Ronald Reagan, they tried with the Bushes, they tried with everybody. They never got ANWR.”
“But we got ANWR in this bill,” Trump said.
(Later, he began to lie that he didn’t want ANWR in the bill because Murkowski crossed him. “I didn’t want to get it approved because I thought that someone had treated me very badly, very badly.”)
In April 2020, while signing a COVID relief bill, Trump repeated the lie about the oil prospects of ANWR at the White House. “Ronald Reagan tried to get it approved; couldn’t do it. Every President tried to get ANWR, and they couldn’t do it. I got it approved,” Trump said.
Sullivan, standing behind Trump, cheered him on. “Yes sir. Great,” beamed Sullivan.
At that event Trump also launched into one of his patented pouts about how he wasn’t afraid to talk about ANWR and he didn’t get enough credit.
“People don’t even talk about it and that’s OK. They don’t have to talk about it. That’s why I talk about it. Because no one else will,” said Trump.
“We love it in Alaska, I’ll tell you that,” said Sullivan.
“But ANWR is perhaps the largest find in the world. Right? It could be,” says Trump.
“But it’s certainly one of them,” said Trump.
“Yes sir,” said Sullivan.
No one who knows anything about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge believes that it contains the largest oil field in the world.
Trump doesn’t even know what the letters in ANWR stand for.
While Trump had plenty of time to get a lease sale completed and follow laws and regulations, he didn’t.
There were no real bids at the Jan. 6 lease sale. The millions put up by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority don’t count. AIDEA never bothered with a business plan or even a political plan.
The logic for having the state invest in ANWR was that since the oil companies wouldn’t do it, the government had to.
This turned 40 years of political babbling about the ANWR bonanza on its head. Instead of getting 90 percent of the lease sale money or even 50 percent, the state would get nothing.
No oil company wasted a dollar on the lease sale, but Gov. Mike Dunleavy rushed in where the oil companies feared to tread. It wasn’t Dunleavy’s money after all.
The waste will continue as Dunleavy goes to court with another lawsuit, one that will be hard to “win” because the Trump administration made such a mess of the ANWR lease sale.
Here is what I wrote six days after the 2020 election:
I suspect the reason the sale didn’t happen is that the industry made it clear to the Trump administration that a lease sale would not attract the giant bids envisioned by Alaska politicians and a sale could prove to be an embarrassment—not of riches, but of paltry bids from companies without the financial muscle to safely develop the area.
There are major questions facing any company that considers bidding on ANWR leases.
The economic and reputational risks, the prospect of extended court fights, the low price of oil, the expense of drilling in a frontier area, the growth of alternative energy supplies, the growing opposition by international banks to Arctic drilling, the chaos created by the pandemic and the certainty of climate change are among the many factors that have probably eroded faith in the mythology of the ANWR lease bonanza.
There have been a few Alaska politicians since 1980 who opposed oil development in ANWR, most of them quietly. The dream that has been built up by the Congressional delegation, the Alaska business community, newspapers and state politicians is that ANWR oil development is the foundation of our future, the boom that will keep the pipeline going and the money flowing.
That the pro-drilling Trump administration would stall an ANWR lease sale is a powerful signal that the dream is a shaky one and that oil companies are not willing to invest in the refuge and face the consequences. There are probably many reasons, but no credible explanation has been given for the delay by Trump’s Interior Department.
Rest assured, given the political sway of the industry and Trump’s receptiveness, there would have been a lease sale in 2019 or 2020 had the companies been pressing hard.
I guess Trump could try to squeeze a lease sale in before departing office in January—ignoring public notice deadlines to push something through—but what responsible company is going to bid serious money on leases that President-elect Biden promises to stop?
The provision to open ANWR to leasing, which may have been the price of getting Sen. Lisa Murkowski to support the 2017 GOP tax bill, has been law since 2017. The law calls for two lease sales to take place and that provision isn’t likely to go away under the new president.
The Biden opposition to ANWR drilling is clear, however, and there may be procedural and legal steps to stop development, regardless of the lease sale language.
On his campaign website, Biden pledges to save “America’s natural treasures by permanently protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other areas impacted by President Trump’s attack on federal lands and waters; and banning new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski said early on that the goal was to have a lease sale before the end of the Trump term.
The Alaska delegation and the Trump administration Interior Department began predicting in 2018 that an ANWR lease sale was going to take place as soon as the middle of 2019. Then they said it would be before the end of 2019. Then they said it would be sometime in 2020.
“Murkowski still expects the administration to sell leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as soon as this summer,” Politico reported in summer 2020..
Politico reported in August that the goal of selling leases before the end of Trump’s first term was still alive.
Now there are predictions that a lease sale will take place before the end of 2021, the deadline in the law, setting up a major fight with Biden.
What’s not clear is why Trump was content just to talk about an ANWR lease sale, instead of conducting one.
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