"No companies bid for the chance to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It was the second auction in four years that failed to draw strong interest."
"One of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s biggest “drill, baby, drill” initiatives suffered a significant setback on Wednesday as the Interior Department announced that a lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ended without a single bidder.
The sale, which was required by Congress, marks the second time in four years that an effort to auction oil and gas leases in the pristine wilderness — home to migrating caribou, polar bears, musk oxen, millions of birds and other wildlife — has been a flop.
The repeated failures suggest that oil companies are either not interested in drilling in the refuge or do not think it’s worth the cost, despite insistence by Mr. Trump and many Republican lawmakers that the refuge should be opened up for drilling. The Biden administration offered 400,000 acres after shaving off one million acres from the original boundaries to avoid areas crucial to the polar bear and Porcupine caribou populations.
“The lack of interest from oil companies in development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge reflects what we and they have known all along: There are some places too special and sacred to exploit with oil and gas drilling,” Laura Daniel-Davis, the acting deputy secretary of the Interior Department, said in a statement."
Lisa Friedman reports for the New York Times January 8, 2025.
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