Arctic

The nation’s sole heavy icebreaker arrived in the Aleutian Islands this week for the first time since 2013.

The U.S. Coast Guard’s Polar Star is preparing to patrol Alaska’s Arctic waters, including the maritime boundary line separating the U.S. and Russia.

The Polar Star sits in the Port of Dutch Harbor. The ship is nearly 400 feet long and can break ice up to 21 feet thick.

The ship arrived with 136 crew members on Tuesday for a pit stop 30 days into a months-long deployment to the Arctic to assert maritime sovereignty and security in the far north.

“The Arctic is incredibly important to us strategically, because of the amount of gas and oil and resources, as well as the fish stocks, which are landed here in Unalaska,” said Capt. Bill Woityra, the cutter’s commanding officer. “These are absolutely U.S. sovereign resources, and we desperately need to protect them against foreign actors, whether it’s foreign fishing fleets or it’s foreign adversaries that are seeking to push the limits of international law and claim those things for themselves.”

Typically, this time of year, this special icebreaking cutter is on its way to Antarctica’s McMurdo Station to drop fuel and other supplies to American scientists doing research near the South Pole.

“But this year, with the global pandemic, they had to cancel the mission,” Woityra said. “That created the opportunity for the Polar Star to come back north again.”

This is the ship’s first winter Arctic deployment since 1982.

In addition to the cutter crew, there are partner-agency researchers and scientists, British sailors from The Royal Navy, midshipmen from the Merchant Marine Academy and deck watch officers and ice pilots from the Healy, the Coast Guard’s medium icebreaker that’s capable of Arctic patrols during summer months.

According to Woityra, the mission isn’t only about national security and securing U.S. economic interests as human activity and international interest in the region expands. It’s also about doing environmental research.

They’re partnering with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to take water samples and measurements while the boat transits over the Arctic Circle to better understand the harsh environment there. Getting data in the remote region during the winter, Woityra says, is otherwise extremely difficult.

“Basically, a heavy icebreaker is built so we can go anywhere on the earth in any thickness of ice during any time of year,” he said.

Even though the Polar Star was built to break through thick ice, just a month into their Arctic deployment, Woityra said the season has been tough on the 44-year-old vessel.

“Breaking ice in the Arctic winter is especially challenging because it’s so hard,” he said. “It sounds like a car crash, just twisting metal and screeching noises and shattering glass. It’s really kind of disconcerting. There’s no danger, but it leaves an unsettling feeling in your stomach.”

He said the crew has been working around the clock just to keep the ship running. On New Year’s Eve, they got stopped in the ice, and their engineers were up all night working to replace blown diodes and resistors that are usually considered obsolete.

“These are parts that just don’t exist anymore,” Woityra said. “We have a warehouse of spares, but when they’re gone, we won’t be able to run this ship anymore.”

That’s why Woityra and other Arctic planners say it’s so important for the government to invest the billions of dollars needed to build new icebreakers in the next decade to replace the Polar Star, which is the nation’s only functional icebreaker after a fire damaged the Healy this past summer.

The federal government is in the process of commissioning one, and Congress has agreed to build five more, but it hasn’t allocated funding.

The construction on the first new ice breaker is expected to be completed in 2024. Woityra said it will be 460 feet long, 90 feet wide, and weigh 23,000 tons — almost twice as much as the Polar Star.

“It’s going to be the largest, most complex, most powerful ship that the Coast Guard has ever built,” he said.

In the meantime, Woityra said the Polar Star’s Arctic mission will help train the future generation of Arctic sailors and mission leaders.

“This is our chance to really build up that experience and expertise and hold our proficiency operating in this environment,” he said. “Once those polar security cutters are delivered in a few years, we’re going to need operators and leaders to actually take them to sea, and we desperately need them to have experience in this environment.”

The Polar Star is expected to leave Unalaska’s Port of Dutch Harbor on Thursday afternoon. Woityra said he expects they will complete their mission and return to Seattle by the end of February.

One of the Trump administration’s biggest energy initiatives suffered a stunning setback Wednesday, as a decades-long push to drill for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ended with a lease sale that attracted just three bidders — one of which was the state of Alaska itself.

Alaska’s state-owned economic development corporation was the only bidder on nine of the parcels offered for lease in the northernmost swath of the refuge, known as the coastal plain. Two small companies also each picked up a single parcel.

Half of the offered leases drew no bids at all.

“They held the lease in ANWR — that is history-making. That will be recorded in the history books and people will talk about it,” said Larry Persily, a longtime observer of the oil and gas industry in Alaska. “But no one showed up.”

The sale generated a tiny fraction of the revenue it was projected to raise.

It was a striking moment in a 40-year fight over drilling in the coastal plain, an area that’s home to migrating caribou, polar bears, birds and other wildlife. It also potentially sits atop billions of barrels of oil, according to federal estimates.

But amid a global recession, low oil prices and an aggressive pressure campaign against leasing by drilling opponents, oil analysts have for months been predicting little interest in the sale, and their forecasts were confirmed Wednesday.

Read all of the bids received here.

Persily took the sale as evidence that while drilling in the refuge remains a long-held dream of some politicians, it is no longer treasured by oil companies.

“It was, in the oil industry terms, a dry hole. A bust,” he said. “They had the lease sale, the administration can feel good about it, but no one’s going to see any oil coming out of ANWR.”

Even Kara Moriarty, head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, acknowledged that the sale results weren’t as “robust” as expected. But she said the industry still supports future access to the coastal plain.

“Today’s sale reflects the brutal economic realities the oil and gas industry continues to face after the unprecedented events of 2020, coupled with ongoing regulatory uncertainty,” she said in a statement.

The lease sale raised a total of $14.4 million in bids, according to the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that held the sale. Nearly all of that came from Alaska’s state-owned economic development corporation, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority.

Half of the cash will go to the federal government, and half will go back to the state of Alaska.

The amount raised is nowhere near what was projected when a Republican-led Congress officially opened the coastal plain to drilling in 2017 as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

The bill ordered two lease sales, the first by the end of this year, with the revenue aimed at offsetting massive tax cuts.

Despite the low interest, Alaska’s Congressional delegation applauded the sale on Wednesday, and so did officials with the Bureau of Land Management, describing it as historic and a success.

Opponents blasted the sale.

“I laughed out loud. It was a joke. A joke to the American people,” said Desirée Sorenson-Groves, director of the Arctic Refuge Defense Campaign. “I’ll tell you, I have a message to those who bid today, there were only three. But here’s the message: ‘You will never ever drill in the Arctic Refuge. We’ll stop you.’”

The land that received no bids on Wednesday will not be leased in this sale.

Of the two small companies that did win leases, one is Regenerate Alaska, a subsidiary of Australia-based 88 Energy. The other is Knik Arm Services, a small Alaska company managed by an investor named Mark Graber.

The state-owned Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, which dominated the sale, has never held federal oil leases before.

But Alaska politicians, including former Republican Gov. Frank Murkowski, recently pushed the corporation to bid, citing the lack of industry interest. Murkowski, in an interview Wednesday, said he expects the corporation to eventually partner with companies to do the actual drilling.

“We’ll see how good an investment it is when we see what the interest is from some companies to negotiate,” he said.

The oil leases are still not finalized.

That process, which includes an antitrust review by the U.S. Department of Justice, typically takes about two months. But the Trump administration is expected to rush to issue the leases formally before the president leaves office in two weeks.

Even if it succeeds, additional oil leasing and drilling in the refuge will face headwinds, said U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., a longtime drilling opponent.

He said his next step will be pushing for “permanent protection” for the Arctic refuge. He’s likely to have support from a Biden administration. The president-elect and his appointee to lead the Interior Department have both said they oppose drilling there.

Huffman said he‘s open to a compromise with drilling boosters — from the state of Alaska to Indigenous Iñupiaq leaders in Kaktovik, the only community inside the refuge’s boundaries —  that would provide them with alternative paths toward economic development.

“We’re not hostile to taking care of the interests here, and helping put folks on a path of economic development that makes sense and that’s sustainable,” Huffman said.

“But whether it’s the climate crisis or the market factors or the extreme logistic and environmental impropriety of drilling in this place, it’s not going to happen,” he said. “It’s just not. And so I think the state of Alaska and the folks in Kaktovik should cut a deal.”

Roger Herrera, a retired BP executive and longtime lobbyist for an Alaska group that pushed Congress to open the refuge, said he was “hugely disappointed” in the results of the sale.

“Alaska is a natural resource state. You take away its natural resources and it has basically nothing,” he said in a phone interview. “Alaska’s motto of ‘North to the Future’ should be re-examined, because I don’t think it has much meaning now.”

A federal judge Tuesday denied requests that she block the Trump administration from issuing oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason’s ruling means the federal government can continue with its plans to hold the refuge’s first-ever oil lease sale Wednesday.

It’s a win for the Trump administration, which has pushed to lock in drilling in the refuge in its final weeks, before President-elect Joe Biden takes office and can try to stop it.

The administration is offering 10-year leases to 22 tracts of land that cover about 1 million acres in the northernmost slice of the refuge, known as the coastal plain.

Gleason’s decisions Tuesday came in three lawsuits filed by an array of groups, including environmental organizations and the Gwich’in Steering Committee.

Read Judge Gleason’s decision here.

In court documents, the groups argue that the federal government failed to follow numerous laws meant to protect wildlife, land, water and people when it crafted its oil-leasing program for the refuge.

They then requested preliminary injunctions.

That means they basically asked Gleason to stop the Trump administration from issuing any oil leases in the refuge — and from authorizing any seismic work to explore for oil there — until their broader lawsuits are decided.

On Tuesday, Gleason denied those requests.

It’s a high legal bar to get an injunction.

Gleason said the groups that filed the lawsuits failed to show that they’d suffer “irreparable harm” if leases were issued, since the oil companies would still have to get additional permits before drilling wells or searching for oil.

Also, Gleason said she could not halt seismic exploration because the government hasn’t yet approved a proposal to do the work. She said the groups could try again for an injunction once the proposal is approved.

Gleason’s decision Tuesday is not a ruling on the merits of the broader lawsuits.

Those court cases will continue.

Earthjustice attorney Erik Grafe, who represents environmental groups in one of the lawsuits, said he was disappointed with Tuesday’s ruling, but the fight is not over.

“We will continue to press our case that the agency approved the program unlawfully and that its decision should be overturned,” Grafe said in a written statement.

In a statement from the U.S. Interior Department, spokesperson Nicholas Goodwin described Gleason’s ruling as “expected and unsurprising.”

“The Department of the Interior looks forward to proceeding with appropriate dispatch to achieve the clear direction it received from Congress in 2017,” Goodwin said.

After a decades-long debate, a Republican-led Congress opened the coastal plain to drilling in 2017. It also ordered the government to hold the first lease sale there by the end of this year.

Gleason was appointed to the federal bench by Democratic former President Barack Obama, and she has ruled against several of the Trump administration’s pro-development initiatives in Alaska.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated.

Two weeks before leaving office, the Trump administration is planning to hold the first-ever oil and gas lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The sale, scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday in Alaska, is a controversial milestone in a 40-year battle over whether to drill for oil in a part of the refuge called the coastal plain.

So, how did we get here after such a long debate? And what will happen next?

Here’s what we know so far.

What, exactly, is the coastal plain?

The coastal plain, also known as the 1002 Area, is the northernmost slice of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, along the Beaufort Sea.

It covers an area roughly the size of Delaware, and makes up about 8% of the refuge, in northeast Alaska.

There’s one village within the coastal plain, Kaktovik, where Inupiaq political leaders support drilling even as residents are divided on the issue. The land is also home to migrating caribou, birds, polar bears and lots of other wildlife. And, it’s thought to sit on top of, potentially, billions of barrels of oil.

For decades, conservation groups and Gwich’in tribes who live just outside the refuge have fought to protect the coastal plain from oil development, while many Alaska politicians have fought to open the area to drilling.

After so much debate, how did the government get to a lease sale?

Part of that story starts in 1980.

That’s when Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. The act created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Before that, it was the smaller Arctic National Wildlife Range.

The act designated millions of acres of the refuge as wilderness, but not the coastal plain. Instead, in Section 1002 of the act, Congress asked the Interior Department to study the possibility of oil development in the coastal plain. (And it subsequently became also known as the 1002 Area.) Congress also reserved the power to decide later whether to open it to drilling.

And so began the fight over what to do with the land, which went unresolved for decades.

And then came 2017.

What big change happened in 2017?

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski worked with the White House to open the coastal plain to drilling as part of the massive tax bill. It was pushed into the bill as a way to create revenue to offset tax cuts.

The bill directed the federal government to carry out two lease sales in the coastal plain by the end of 2024, with the first by the end of this year.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the leasing program could generate $1.8 billion over a decade, to be split between Alaska and the federal government.

But critics of the sale, including the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, say they expect the dollar-figure to be much lower.

Since Trump signed the tax bill into law, the federal Bureau of Land Management has led the environmental review process that’s required before a lease sale can take place.

Opponents of the sale say the administration picked up a lot of speed — too much speed, they argue — to lock in oil drilling in the weeks after the November presidential election. BLM set Jan. 6 as the date for a lease sale in early December, while a 30-day comment window was still ongoing.

What is the Trump administration selling exactly?

It’s offering drilling rights to 22 tracts of land that cover about 1 million federal acres of the coastal plain, or about 5% of the whole refuge.

The highest bidder on each tract will get a 10-year oil and gas lease for that piece of land. If a tract gets no bids, then no one gets the lease.

What happens Wednesday?

Those interested in buying the oil leases had to submit sealed bids to the government last month.

At 10 a.m. Wednesday in Alaska, government officials will open those bids in an event streamed online, and accept the highest offers.

What happens after the sale?

The leases will not be issued on Wednesday.

The Department of Justice will need to conduct an antitrust review. And winning bidders also must sign paperwork and pay.

The process to issue the leases usually takes about two months, but the Trump administration will likely try to finalize the sales in just two weeks, before Democratic President Joe Biden is sworn in Jan. 20.

Wait. Aren’t there a lot of lawsuits?

Right. Looming over the sale are four lawsuits, filed by environmental organizations, the Gwich’in Steering Committee, tribal groups and a coalition of 15 states.

In court documents, they argue the Trump administration’s oil-leasing program for the refuge is rushed and legally flawed, and any agreements based on it — including any leases — should, basically, be canceled.

In three of the lawsuits, the groups requested a preliminary injunction.

That means they wanted U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason to stop the government from issuing any oil leases for the refuge, and from allowing any seismic oil exploration, until the broader lawsuits are resolved.

But Gleason denied those requests late Tuesday afternoon.

What do we know about who will bid on the oil and gas leases?

Not a whole lot.

BLM spokeswoman Lesli Ellis-Wouters said Monday that the agency has received bids, but she declined to say how many or who they came from.

Oil and gas companies aren’t talking publicly about their plans for the sale either.

A spokesman for the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, which seemed like a likely contender to participate in the sale, confirmed by email Tuesday that it is not bidding.

Oil industry analysts have said they expect interest to be lukewarm in the sale for many reasons.

A major one is the opposition.

Opponents to drilling in the refuge have raised concerns about its impacts on Indigenous people, the global climate, and wildlife, including the caribou that give birth in the coastal plain and the polar bears that den there.

They’ve lobbied oil companies, banks and other financial institutions to stay away from developing the refuge. A number of major banks say they won’t fund oil projects in the Arctic.

Also, drilling in the Arctic is expensive, and last year’s oil price war, paired with the pandemic, hit the industry hard.

On top of that, there’s uncertainty around future oil demand, how much oil actually exists under the coastal plain and the changing presidential administration.

Citing concerns about limited industry interest, Alaska politicians have recently lobbied for the state to step into the sale.

And, in a very unusual move, the board of the state-owned Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority voted to bid up to $20 million on the leases.

An AIDEA spokeswoman declined to say this week whether the corporation actually decided to submit any offers.

Who can bid on the leases?

The federal rules are kind of vague, and say those who can hold a lease include pretty much any private, public or municipal corporation organized under the law.

Ellis-Wouters, with BLM, says bidders must have an intent to develop the land.

Who supports drilling in the refuge and who opposes it?

It’s a complicated answer.

Alaskans are divided on the issue, just like the country is.

Many Alaska politicians, including the current Congressional delegation, have long fought to open the coastal plain to drilling. Oil and gas industry trade groups also support developing the coastal plain, along with the Kaktovik Iñupiat Corporation, the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and Alaska’s governor. They argue it’d be good for jobs, the economy and state revenue, and say drilling can happen without harming the land and animals.

On the other side, environmental and conservation groups have long tried to keep oil rigs out of the refuge. They counter that there’s no way oil development can happen in the coastal plain without harming wildlife and the tundra, and without exacerbating climate change in a place that’s already warming fast. Among some of the most vocal opponents are the Gwich’in, an Indigenous group who say the land is sacred and whose members hunt caribou that commonly give birth in the refuge.

President-elect Joe Biden says he also opposes drilling in the refuge, but can he reverse oil leasing?

If the oil leases are finalized before Biden takes office, it could be more difficult to reverse course.

It’s possible Biden could try to buy the leases back.

Also, just because a company has a lease doesn’t mean it can immediately go develop the land. Analysts have said it’s possible a Biden administration could hold up the process for companies to get the permits they need to search for oil and build their infrastructure.

“What they would try to do is make it so difficult, so onerous, to get the array of permits that the companies just kind of say, ‘Well, we’re not going to spend 10 years just trying to get a simple permit, we’re going to put our money and our investment elsewhere,’” says Andy Mack, a former Alaska natural resources commissioner.

Meanwhile, in federal court, the lawsuits are expected to continue to wind through the system, and a judge could later rule to cancel the leases.

Still, the 2017 tax law exists, ordering a second lease sale in the coastal plain by the end of 2024. Congress would have to pass a law to undo that part of the tax act if it doesn’t want to follow through.

What questions do you have that we missed? Email reporter Tegan Hanlon at thanlon@alaskapublic.org. 

Alaska Public Media’s Nat Herz contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: This post has been updated.

A federal judge in Anchorage says she could rule as soon as Tuesday on a request by environmental groups to block the Trump administration from carrying out the first-ever lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The government is planning to hold the sale Wednesday morning.

It’s a major moment in a 40-year fight over whether to drill for oil in the northernmost slice of the refuge, called the coastal plain.

But looming over the sale are four lawsuits, filed by environmental organizations, tribal groups and a coalition of 15 states. In court documents, they argue that the Trump administration’s oil-leasing program for the refuge is rushed and legally flawed.

In three of the lawsuits, the groups are requesting a preliminary injunction.

Basically: They want U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason to stop the government from issuing any oil leases for the refuge, and from allowing any seismic work to explore for oil there until the broader lawsuits are resolved.

On Monday, Gleason heard arguments by videoconference on why she should — and shouldn’t — intervene.

Lawyers for The Audubon Society and three other environmental groups told Gleason that the Trump administration failed to comply with a series of environmental laws designed to protect the refuge, and didn’t disclose the potential global-warming consequences of oil development.

They also said massive seismic trucks rolling across the tundra to search for oil this winter would harm the refuge. And, they argued, that if oil leases are issued, it’ll be harder for the government to ever reverse course.

“Those leases transfer rights,” said Earthjustice attorney Kate Glover. “It makes it difficult for BLM to change its mind and undo decisions later.”

On the other side Monday were lawyers for the federal government, the North Slope Borough, the Kaktovik Inupiat Corporation and oil and gas industry trade groups. They told Gleason that the lawsuits were premature. Even if a company got an oil lease, it would still need other approvals to develop the land, said Attorney Paul Turcke, with the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Issuance of an oil and gas lease does not have any direct effects on the environment, since it does not authorize drilling or any other ground-disturbing activities,” Turcke said.

Gleason said she aims to have a decision by the end of the day on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the deadline has already passed for companies to submit their bids to the federal Bureau of Land Management for the oil lease sale.

BLM Alaska spokeswoman Lesli Ellis-Wouters said Monday that the agency had received bids in the lease sale, but she declined to say how many or who they came from.

The agency says it will open the bids during an event streamed online Wednesday, starting at 10 a.m.

The government is offering drilling rights to 22 tracts of land that cover about 1 million acres of the coastal plain, or roughly 5% of the refuge.

After the sale, the leases still must go through a review process before they’re finalized. That usually takes about two months, but it’s likely the Trump administration will try to complete the process before it leaves office on Jan. 20.

In the lead-up to Wednesday, big questions remain about how much interest the oil industry has in the leases, and what the changing administration will mean.

President-elect Joe Biden has said he opposes drilling in the refuge, and will permanently protect the land, but hasn’t said how.

In another last-minute move, the Trump administration on Monday finalized a plan to dramatically increase the land available for oil and gas drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an effort already facing legal challenges from groups concerned about threats to polar bears, caribou, migratory birds, climate change and subsistence resources.

The Bureau of Land Management on Monday announced that it had finalized a new activity plan for the 23-million-acre reserve in the Arctic, with a signing by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt on New Year’s Eve.

The reserve, the largest area of federally managed land in the U.S., is located west of the Prudhoe Bay oil fields in an area containing large new oil discoveries, including ConocoPhillips’ Willow prospect.

The new activity plan will allow oil and gas leasing across 18.6 million acres — up by 7 million acres from a 2013 plan completed during the Obama administration.

The plan includes protections for the environment, the agency said in a statement. New activity such as drilling would require additional government review before it could occur.

Oil and gas leasing could occur in the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area, according to the plan, but with limits on surface use, among other protections. The Teshekpuk Lake Special Area is considered highly important wildlife habitat. Timing restrictions would also help protect wildlife there, the agency said.

“We developed a plan that is responsive to state and local government requests and needs,” said Chad Padgett, the BLM’s state director for Alaska. “Our team of subject matter experts worked diligently to provide a robust environmental review that achieves a balance between conservation stewardship, being a good neighbor, and responsibly developing our natural resources to boost local and national economies.”

The announcement comes as the Trump administration moves swiftly to finalize plans promoting future development in other parts of Alaska, as well. On Wednesday, it will hold the federal government’s first-ever oil and gas lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Conservation groups are also fighting that effort in court.

The expanded acreage in the petroleum reserve opens much of northern Alaska to the possibility of oil and gas leasing, the Defenders of Wildlife said in a statement. The conservation group has joined others in a lawsuit to halt the expansion of available acreage in the petroleum reserve.

“More drilling will just exacerbate the climate crisis in a region that is already experiencing warming twice as fast as anywhere on the planet. It is bad for the Western Arctic, bad for people and bad for wildlife,” said Nicole Whittington-Evans, Alaska program director for Defenders of Wildlife.

A federal estimate in 2017 estimated the petroleum reserve holds 8.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 25 trillion feet of recoverable natural gas.