The U.S. Department of the Interior announced plans on Thursday to open millions of acres of pristine land in Alaska to drilling. Secretary Doug Burgum said extraction rights will be granted on more than 82 percent of the state’s 10-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve and the program will be reactivated to allow new drilling in the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), which at 631,000 hectares is the largest protected wilderness area in the United States. The decision reverses environmental protection measures adopted by Joe Biden in 2023. At that time, the former president had canceled licenses to drill for gas and oil in this area with the aim of protecting the environment and countering climate change, also in view of the fact that climate change is affecting the Arctic at a faster rate than the rest of the world.
In addition, the Department of the Interior will work on a project to build a pipeline with the goal of transporting liquefied natural gas for export to Asia.
Under the Biden administration, the project for Ambler Road, which would have run through Gates of the Arctic National Park and Reserve, had also been blocked because it would have harmed the region’s indigenous communities and wildlife habitat. The previous administration had made these decisions with the goal of achieving a sustainable energy transition. Now, in addition to drilling in the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge the Trump administration’s new department will work on the construction of Ambler Road on the wilderness of northern Alaska to allow the operation of a mine for copper and zinc mining.
The decision has already attracted the attention of environmentalists who oppose it as a catastrophic decision that damages the delicate ecosystem and also harms the native communities living there, such as the Athabaskan and Inupiat peoples. “Any oil drilling or any leasing will severely compromise what is truly special about the refuge,” said Bobby McEnaney, director of land conservation at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an international nonprofit environmental organization. “The refuge is home to an extraordinary number of wildlife species, the habitat of polar bears, musk ox and caribou. It’s important to many indigenous people who live up there,” McEnaney pointed out. Activist Alex Johnson of the National Parks Conservation Association, an independent environmental association, also said that “construction of Ambler Road would pollute one of the most spectacular intact landscapes in the entire national park system, including 11 major river crossings. Johnson called the move “deeply troubling to anyone who cares about national parks and wildlife in the arctic.”
