ConocoPhillip’s Willow Project—a large oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope with an $8 billion price tag—is all but approved by the White House according to congressional sources. The same sources say the official announcement is due next week.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pushed back the seemingly imminent confirmation Friday; she said nothing was final and that the US Department of the Interior would make an “independent decision on the Willow Project.”
Willow is a victory for Alaska lawmakers and various indigenous tribes who have long sought the kinds of economic opportunities that will come to the most remote part of the United States. Climate activists, however, have long protested the project as a betrayal of President Joe Biden’s commitments on addressing the climate crisis and a source of health risks.
The Willow Project seeks to drill oil on a trio of sites inside the 23-million acre National Petroleum Reserve, which is located 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. An estimated 600 million barrels of oil could be pumped out of there over the next three decades; that total is almost twice the amount of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Though more oil will reduce fuel costs, the Biden administration estimates that oil generated by the Willow Project would release approximately 9.2 million metric tons of carbon pollution to the atmosphere every year.
