ANWR Remains As It Ever Was: Exploration is at a standstill as various lawsuits wait for resolution.

• Author: Kay, Alexandra
• Position: OIL & GAS

He came so close. For more than forty years, the most enduring cause that Don Young advocated for, as Congressman for All Alaska, was oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Before he died in March, Young had seen a president sign legislation authorizing lease sales in ANWR's coastal plain; he saw a lease sale actually carried out; and he was on the verge of seeing initial exploration toward eventual development.

The first exploration campaign is on hold, pending court action. And Young had one more counterattack in his pocket, a bill to prevent a moratorium on leasing in the refuge: HR 1726, the ANWR Act, which stands for "America Needs Worthwhile Resources." His last ANWR bill was only the latest, after fourteen previous attempts to open ANWR.

The attempt that succeeded came in December 2017, when an ANWR rider became law with then-President Donald Trump's signature on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. "We finally got it done," Young said at the time.

In his fifth decade on Capitol Hill, Young should have known that hardly anything in politics is final.

AIDEA Takes the Cake

Established in 1960 and expanded in 1980, ANWR encompasses approximately 19.3 million acres, most of it designated as wilderness area. The major exception from that designation is 1.5 million acres of the coastal plain. Section 1002 of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) requires an "analysis of the impacts of oil and gas exploration, development, and production, and to authorize exploratory activity within the Coastal Plain in a manner that avoids significant adverse effects on the fish and wildlife and other resources."

At the same time, Section 1002 of ANILCA states that "production of oil and gas from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is prohibited and no leasing or other development leading to production of oil and gas from the [Refuge] shall be undertaken until authorized by an act of Congress."

Congress acted in 2017. Over the next three years, the US Department of Interior published the required environmental impact study, a leasing program was approved, and in January 2021 the lease sale results were released. (The news was sidelined that day by the riot at the US Capitol.)

The results-$14.4 million bid on 437,804 acres covering eleven parcels--might seem impressive, yet the outcome was a disappointment. During the decades that Congress sat on the question, the ANWR debate proceeded along a second prong: a...