Tucked amid the other destruction included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act the Senate passed in the wee hours last Saturday is a provision to open up 1.5 million acres on the coastal plain of the vast Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. It’s called Area 1002.
You would think throwing it open for leasing would have nothing to do with a tax bill and shouldn’t have been included at all. But the Republicans who have been struggling to get this area drilled for 30 years managed to make the provision mesh with the rules for excluding non-relevant matters by claiming this would bring in large amounts of revenue to reduce the $1.4 trillion deficit they are creating by dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the hands of America’s richest.
At 19.3 million acres, the ANWR is the largest stretch of pristine wilderness in the United States. But besides being home to two giant caribou herds, three species of bear, wolves, Arctic foxes, musk oxen, vast numbers of birds, and other species, beneath the refuge is oil. Quite a lot of it, in fact. The U.S. Geological Service estimates that there are 4.3 billion to 11.8 billion barrels of the stuff.
The wide range of that estimate is in great part due to the fact only one exploratory well has been drilled in the ANWR—and that was in 1985, and the results have not been made public. Not even the USGS has seen them. If the low estimate is correct, that’s nearly twice as much in the next largest reserve in Alaska.
Drilling production wells there has been a matter of contention for decades between the oil industry and its backers and preservationists and theirs. Including the ANWR drilling provision helped capture the vote for the tax bill of an otherwise reluctant Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski. She made noise subsequently about how such drilling will secure Alaska’s future. That, of course, depends on what kind of future we’re talking about.
What’s almost as irksome as the environmental destruction oil production in Area 1002 might cause? The economic arguments for doing so stink.
As Julie Flynn Mogensen at Mother Jones points out, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the two leases the tax bill authorizes over the next 10 years will raise $1.1 billion in federal revenues and another $1.1 billion for Alaska. Touting its goal of “energy dominance,” the Trump regime, in its 2018 budget report in May, put the federal figure at $1.8 billion:
But experts warn that the CBO’s estimates are off—by a lot. According to data prepared for the nonprofit Alaska Wilderness League by David Murphy, an assistant professor of environmental studies at St. Lawrence University, and analyzed by Bloomberg, the federal government is actually likely to raise less than a fifth of that 10-year-goal, or about $145 million. This lower estimate is based on historic sales in the region; the average bid for drilling along Alaska’s North Slope since 2000 is $194 per acre. So, bids for ANWR land would need to be nearly seven times higher than that in order to match the $1.1 billion federal estimate. [...]
Findings from both the Audubon Society, a nonprofit conservation organization and the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, similarly diverge from CBO estimates, but predict that oil and gas drilling would yield even lower numbers than Murphy suggests, at just $37.5 million over the next decade. They hinge their estimates on the average bid per acre since 1999 in the much larger, neighboring National Petroleum Reserve (an area already allocated for oil and gas leasing), which is just $50 per acre.
Leaders at the Natural Resource Defense Center, a leading environmental advocacy group, have nothing good to say about drilling in ANWR:
“Senate Republicans are following the irresponsible lead of their House Republican colleagues promoting dirty energy we don’t need,” said Franz Matzner, deputy director of federal campaigns for NRDC’s Center for Policy Advocacy. [...]
It is proof, as NRDC’s Alaska Director, Niel Lawrence, notes, that no part of our natural heritage is safe from commercial exploration these days. We don’t need the oil, and even if we did, the Arctic Refuge is the last place we should tear up to get at it, he says.
Let’s assume the provision remains in the final tax bill being hammered out by the Senate and House conference committee. If it stays in, and Donald Trump adds his signature, the fight will go where it usually does in similar matters: into litigation. Whether drilling in this wilderness can be deep-sixed will depend on whether foes can make a good case in the courts for stopping it, how quickly the transformation of our energy system away from fossil fuels can be achieved, and/or whether Congress and the presidency can be pried out of Republican hands and a new majority can end this myopic plundering of the wild for profit.