With a drum roll of rushed procedures, the Bureau of Land Management opened the bids to, at long last, explore and develop within the Arctic Refuge. Ta-da! No major or mid-size oil company showed up at all. Instead, the bid total was $14 million, most of which came from a state agency that has no track record in oil development. For context, it’s important to recall that ANWR got added on to Trump’s tax bill as a way to offset tax cuts to the tune of $1.8 billion. “It was, in oil industry terms, a dry hole. A bust,” said oil and gas analyst, Larry Persily. (Kate Troll, “ANWR lease flop offers Alaska a dose of harsh energy reality”)
This is a lucid column in terms of the economics of modern oil drilling. As the investment company BlackRock said: “Climate risk is investment risk.” For Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the risk was purely economic for drillers: To spend millions speculating on land that may or may not be a good oil resource while solar and wind are approaching parity in costs per milliwatt-hour—or even much better—would be an investment in insanity.
But I continue my push on the real tragedy here:
Three years ago, President Donald Trump proclaimed that opening the Arctic Refuge would lead to America’s energy dominance. The entire Alaska congressional delegation jumped on the President’s bandwagon, declaring that Arctic Oil will be the next economic savior for Alaska’s economy. The “glory days” of big oil were about to return, according to these political leaders.
Someone yelled “jump for some cash”, and Alaskan leaders asked “how high?”
Yes, ANWR has been in the process of being leased off for thirty years now, creating a whole generation of Alaskans that thought “wildlife refuge” was a misnomer for some inevitably destroyed oil lands. Perhaps that is why people like to shorten it as “an-wahr”, so they don’t have to consider what the acronym really means as they seek to turn a refuge upside down.
Everyone is patting themselves on the back, thanking some partially rational economic actors who decided to not move forward with the selling off and destruction of the wildlife refuge. But ANWR’s placement on the chopping block goes to show that there is no rationalism when it comes to promises of easy money and “golden ages”. Once this next “golden age” left, what next to sell off for diminished returns, converting “The Last Frontier” into a husk of its allure?
And it was such a desperate sale, over these past few years. Like a drug addict trying to sell their clothes for just a bit more. The ANWR chapter has not finished—another future-elected drug addict will want to sell it off for some cash. So if another John D. Rockefeller exists out there, try to buy it from the Bureau of Land Management so the U.S.G. and Alaskan opportunists don’t try to shit where they eat again.