The Interior Department also said it would allow a contentious road to be built through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Alaska.
The Trump administration on Thursday announced a plan to allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the largest remaining tracts of pristine wilderness in the United States.
The decision was the latest twist in a long-running fight over the fate of the refuge’s coastal plain, an unspoiled expanse of 1.56 million acres that is believed to sit atop billions of barrels of oil but is also a critical habitat for polar bears, caribou, migratory birds and other wildlife.
During his first term, President Trump signed a 2017 tax bill that required two oil and gas lease sales in the coastal plain, but the Biden administration later suspended and then canceled those leases.
On Thursday, the Interior Department said it would hold an oil and gas lease sale in the coastal plain as soon as this winter. The agency also said it would reinstate seven oil leases in the refuge that the state of Alaska acquired in 2021 but that had been canceled two years later by the Biden administration.
“This land should and will be supporting responsible oil and gas leasing,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said during an “Alaska Day” event at the Interior Department’s headquarters, which came even as many Interior employees were furloughed during the government shutdown.
Mr. Burgum also announced that the Interior Department had finalized a deal that would allow a contentious gravel road to be built through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Alaska. And he reiterated that the agency would greenlight an industrial road that would cut through pristine wilderness to reach a proposed copper and zinc mine in northern Alaska.
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