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In a sign of just how much the administration is pinning on a lease sale there, Trump's budget for 2021 projected it would produce a billion dollars in revenue. In early March, assistant Interior secretary Susan Combs reiterated the expectation that a lease sale could garner a billion dollars in revenue, even after Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) said that would require every single acre of the Coastal Plain to be leased for $678—more than 60 times the amount of the average lease sold in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska in 2019.
A week later, BLM Deputy Director Michael Nedd testified before the House Natural Resources Committee that the agency still expected to bring in a billion dollars in revenue, but clarified that it would be leasing just 400,000 acres of the Coastal Plain.
"So they're only going to offer 400,000 acres and they're assuming a billion dollars—that's remarkable," Huffman said at the hearing. "Because if you offered the entire 1.5 million acres of the Coastal Plain you'd have to get $678 per acre from that lease sale in order to get to a billion dollars."
He added, "If you only did 400,000 you'd have to get a lot more than that. Do you think that's a reasonable offer to assume?"
Nedd replied that he would get back to him.
While it's unclear whether the Trump administration will be able to make inroads in the Arctic refuge, the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to the west has been a different story. There the question has not been whether the area will see expanded drilling, but rather how much.
The public comment period is for a supplemental environmental review of the Willow project, which came after the company revised its plan in response to concerns raised by residents of Nuiqsut. The new plan scraps a past design that called for the construction of a gravel island, instead relying on an existing dock to receive shipments and the construction of a new ice road to transport any goods or equipment.
Normally, the release of a new plan would spur meetings within the village as locals processed the implications of a project and figured out how best to comment. Now, they instead are relying on teleconferencing—an imperfect solution at best.
"Now that everyone is using it, there are members who can never get through to call in," said Itta, the tribal administrator. "It's hard to really understand what is being said or done. It's not effective."
Residents of Nuiqsut, like tribal administrator Martha Itta, are concerned about providing public comment on the ConocoPhillips’ Willow project amid the coronavirus pandemic. Credit: Sabrina Shankman/InsideClimate News
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