Trump’s ANWR move could spawn epic oil, natural gas battle: Fuel for Thought
Oil majors thirsty for reserves likely to line up for any lease sale
President Trump has uncorked yet another controversy over energy vs the environment and it promises to be a heavyweight battle.
The White House budget proposal includes a revenue line of almost $2 billion from selling oil and gas leases in the richly oil-prospective northeastern coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska.
Until the climate change debate came along, leasing and drilling in the ANWR (pronounced an-war) Coastal Plain was arguably the most ferociously contested item on the oil and gas industry’s wish list at the national level.
First, a little background: In 1960, less than one year after Alaska became a state, Congress created the Arctic National Wildlife Range.
Twenty years later, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) expanded the Arctic Range to 18 million acres, renamed it the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, designated 8 million acres as National Wilderness, designated three rivers as National Wild Rivers, and called for wildlife studies and an oil and gas assessment of 1.5 million acres of the ANWR Coastal Plain (the 1002 area).
There is not enough space here to track the tortuous history of legal and regulatory battles and failed legislation that has marked efforts to either develop oil and gas in the ANWR Coastal Plain or to lock it up against development permanently.
Suffice to say that ANILCA granted surface and subsurface rights to the Inupiat Native Americans living near the North Slope village of Kaktovik on the ANWR Coastal Plain, seismic studies were conducted on Inupiat land, and what has been called the “the tightest hole of all time” (KIC-1) was drilled and plugged on that acreage by a group led by Chevron.
Only a handful of people have ever known the well results—and no one has spilled the beans yet.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
