By Richard Valdmanis and Timothy Gardner
(Reuters) -The U.S. Interior Department said on Wednesday a congressionally mandated oil and gas drilling lease auction in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge received no bids from energy companies.
Outgoing President Joe Biden's administration billed the outcome as proof the 19 million-acre refuge, home to species including polar bears and Porcupine caribou, should remain off-limits to fossil fuel development, even as President-elect Donald Trump seeks to encourage expanded drilling there.
"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 put at risk with oil and gas drilling," said Acting Deputy Interior Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis.
The U.S. was scheduled to hold a federal auction for some 400,000 acres of the refuge, the minimum required by the 2017 Tax Act, on Friday, but had required bidders to express interest in advance by a Jan. 6 deadline.
The lack of interest means no auction will be held.
Trump's previous administration had sold oil and gas leases in ANWR in 2021, but the sale generated just $14.4 million in high bids, with an Alaska state agency as the sole bidder for most of the acreage sold.
ANWR's 1.6 million-acre coastal area along the Beaufort Sea is estimated to have up to 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil, according to government surveys. But oil companies have been hesitant to pursue the resources in part because of high costs of development, and public relations challenges around drilling in a wildlife sanctuary.
A native group, Voice of the Arctic Inupiat, which favors drilling, said in a statement ahead of the auction that the sale's small size undermined economic potential for the region.
The push to open the refuge has been decried by other native groups including the Gwich'in Steering Committee, which represents tribes that depend on the caribou for subsistence.
The failed lease sale "clearly demonstrates that even oil companies recognize what we have known all along: drilling in the Arctic Refuge is not worth the economic risk and liability that results from development on sacred lands without the consent of Indigenous Peoples," the committee said in a release.
On Monday, Alaska sued the Biden administration over the planned sale saying curbs on land that Interior offered in ANWR made it "impossible or impracticable to develop." The suit said that when combined with the department's cancellation of the leases granted during the last days of Trump's first presidency, the state will get just a fraction of the $1.1 billion the federal government estimated it would get in revenues from energy development.
Oil industry group the American Petroleum Institute had criticized the offering as small and ill-placed.