Lakes and connecting streams in the northeastern part of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska are seen from the air on June 26, 2014. In its last days, the Biden administration is proposing new protections for the reserve. (Photo by Bob Wick/U.S. Bureau of Land Management)
Four days before President Joe Biden is set to leave office, his administration recommended that about 3 million more acres in Alaska’s western Arctic be protected from development and issued a guideline, effective immediately, requiring additional protections for traditional Native subsistence harvests of fish, caribou and other resources.
The new recommendations and guidance, which apply to the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, run counter to President-elect Donald Trump’s expressed plans to expand oil drilling in the Arctic and elsewhere and to overturn Biden administration environmental policies more broadly.
Acting Deputy Interior Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis, who announced the recommendations and guidelines in a telephone news conference, acknowledged that the incoming administration might disagree with the Biden administration’s action.
“We know we’re in these seats for a few more days, and the next team may have a different perspective on how we manage public lands, including in the Western Arctic, but I think really we all have to agree that we must undertake activities in this incredible area with due consideration as to how they may impact subsistence resources that we are today identifying as a significant resource value,” she said.
While environmentalists said they welcomed the move, critics of the Biden administration’s Arctic oil policies were dismissive.
“From their first day to nearly their last, the Biden administration willfully ignored federal law to try to convert the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska into de facto federal wilderness,” said a social media post by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. The administration’s actions concerning the petroleum reserve should be immediately repealed, she said in the post. “The silver lining? Only four more days of this,” she added.
In a statement, Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, called it “the last gasp of a failed administration trying to crush Alaska and silence the voices of the Inupiat people who actually live on the North Slope.”
The recommendations for additional land to be protected as part of what are termed “special areas” and the guidance for elevating the importance of subsistence and tribal consultation could be ignored or scrapped by the incoming Trump administration.
The recommendations build on an updated management blueprint that the Biden administration released in 2024. That rule made some modifications to an Obama administration-era plan that classified about half of the reserve as off-limits to oil development, adding some stipulations to minimize development impacts. It also established an avenue for additional lands in the reserve to be put into no-development special area status. That provision is what triggered the proposal released Thursday.
There are currently five special areas within the reserve: at Teshekpuk Lake at the northeastern corner of the reserve, the largest North Slope lake; along the Colville River, which flows along the reserve’s eastern boundary; and at Kasegaluk, Lagoon, Peard Bay, Teshekpuk Lake and the Utukok River Uplands in the western part of the reserve.
The northeastern part of the reserve is the area considered most likely to hold oil and where development has spread in recent years. There is already production in that area, and the most notable production expected in the future is from ConocoPhillips’ Willow project. Willow won Biden administration approval in 2023. Production is expected to start by the end of the decade and peak at 180,000 barrels per day; current production from all North Slope fields amounts to less than 470,000 barrels per day.
The recommendation for 3 million additional acres is based on 88,000 public comments received after the Department of the Interior last summer floated the idea of expanding protections, Daniel-Davis said.
Included in the recommended additions is a new sixth protected area, a 1.3-million-acre Nuiqsut Subsistence Use Area around that North Slope village. Also recommended are additions to the Teshekpuk Lake, Colville River, Utukok River Uplands and Peard Bay special areas.
Like the existing Teshekpuk special area, which holds important habitat for caribou, fish and migratory birds, the village of Nuiqsut is within the reserve’s northeastern corner, the area of the reserve where oil development has occurred. Nuiqsut is so close that oilfield infrastructure can be seen from the village.
Daniel-Davis said the new recommendation and guidelines should not affect existing leases or approved activities, including those going on at Willow.
“Valid existing rights are always respected with regard to approving activities,” she said.
The recommendations for new special area acreage are backed by a 16-page report that summarizes public comments and scientific information.
“The best available current information requires the BLM to take additional steps to ensure maximum protection of significant resource values in the NPR-A and to mitigate reasonably foreseeable and significantly adverse effects of proposed oil and gas activities,” the report said.
The Biden administration’s parting actions on National Petroleum Reserve development got a positive response from environmentalists and some Nuiqsut residents.
“Today’s announcement shows that BLM recognizes what scientists have long told us: that we must protect the diversity of plants and wildlife in the Western Arctic, including the calving grounds and migration corridors that sustain the caribou on which local Indigenous communities – such as Nuiqsut – depend to feed their families,” Meda DeWitt, Alaska senior manager of Wilthe Wilderness Society, said in a statement.
Whether the recommendations or guidance will have any lasting effect is unclear.
Even some supporters were skeptical. Nauri Simmonds, executive director for Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, said the administration’s announcement was well intentioned but unlikely to help protect resources important to survival and cultural identity.
“We appreciate any movement and help in this matter and don’t want to diminish those efforts or any support given by entities and individuals towards these changes, but this is so little and so very late,” she said in a statement.
Trump is already poised to take executive action overturning protections and opening more of the Arctic to oil development. Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy has urged him to do so.
Alaska political and business leaders, including prominent Inupiat leaders on the North Slope, had previously panned the idea of adding or expanding protected special areas in the reserve.
Among those in opposition was Voice of Arctic Iñupiat, a North Slope coalition that has generally favored Arctic oil development for the economic benefits it brings to the region.
In a statement Thursday, the organization’s president reiterated the objections to new protective areas.
“The Biden administration is selectively citing Indigenous voices, while ignoring wide swaths of the North Slope Iñupiat, and fails to understand the implications of this announcement. Instead, it listened to voices that agreed with its policy agenda to justify its actions while ignoring the overwhelming majority of North Slope residents and locally elected leaders who opposed today’s decision,” Nagruk Harcharek, the group’s president, said in the statement.
Even if the proposals result in no changes on the ground, the administrative record surrounding them might emerge in future debates, including possible legal debates.
The action “followed the science that clearly shows that these areas’ irreplaceable values require maximum protection against harm from oil drilling. This is a model of inclusive, evidence-based land management and a win for wildlife and people,” Erik Grafe, an Anchorage-based attorney for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, said in a statement “The incoming Trump administration will have an obligation to acknowledge that oil development significantly harms the Western Arctic’s irreplaceable natural values.”
Bridget Psarianos, an attorney with the environmental law firm Trustees for Alaska, said Trump and his allies have made no secret about their plans to reverse protections, including those in the arctic.
“But at the same time, I think we and our partners have also made it abundantly clear that we’re going to keep fighting, and keep fighting for protections in the Western Arctic,” she said.
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