Biden-Harris administration reportedly plans to approve Willow oil drilling project in Alaska

The Biden-Har­ris admin­is­tra­tion will scale back but approve the pro­posed Wil­low Project on Alaska’s North Slope, the largest pend­ing oil and gas devel­op­ment in the Unit­ed States, accord­ing to reports pub­lished by The New York Times, Bloomberg, and oth­er news orga­ni­za­tions.

The devel­op­ment by Cono­coPhillips would be locat­ed west of the Prud­hoe Bay oil field, in the twen­ty-three mil­lion-acre Nation­al Petro­le­um Reserve, a vast and large­ly wild swath of the nation’s forty-ninth state. At peak oper­a­tion, it is expect­ed to pro­duce 180,000 bar­rels of oil each day.

Cono­coPhillips had pro­posed five drilling pads at the site.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Man­age­ment, in an envi­ron­men­tal review released in Feb­ru­ary, pro­posed a small­er “foot­print” of three drilling pads able to accom­mo­date two hun­dred and nine­teen wells. White House aides, seek­ing to mol­li­fy envi­ron­men­tal groups, have float­ed the idea of two drilling platforms.

As draft deci­sion doc­u­ments cir­cu­lat­ed Fri­day, White House press sec­re­tary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that “no final deci­sions have been made.”

Furi­ous lob­by­ing has con­tin­ued by both pro­po­nents and oppo­nents of a project that would be locat­ed in one of the most remote cor­ners of America.

The Alas­ka con­gres­sion­al del­e­ga­tion has mount­ed a full-court press for Wil­low, enlist­ing back­ing from orga­nized labor, may­ors of near­by Indige­nous vil­lages, and unan­i­mous res­o­lu­tions of sup­port from the Alas­ka Leg­is­la­ture and Uni­ver­si­ty of Alas­ka Board of Regents. The del­e­ga­tion met recent­ly with Pres­i­dent Biden at the White House.

New Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mary Pel­to­la tweet­ed: “Encour­ag­ing news on Wil­low today – seems like the Admin­is­tra­tion is tak­ing Alaskans’ sup­port for this project seri­ous­ly. I don’t want to jinx any­thing but I hope the Admin­is­tra­tion stays the course and reap­proves this project. Alaskans are watching.”

Sen­a­tor Lisa Murkows­ki, R‑Alaska, has pressed for Wil­low, describ­ing the devel­op­ment as “metic­u­lous­ly planned, social­ly just and envi­ron­men­tal­ly sound.” She has pressed for three drilling sites, say­ing: “Wil­low is too impor­tant to Alaska’s future to set­tle for any­thing less than an eco­nom­i­cal­ly viable project.”

Three pads are “the min­i­mum for Wil­low to remain eco­nom­i­cal­ly viable,” Pel­to­la said last month.

Envi­ron­men­tal groups have cam­paigned against what the Sier­ra Club has described as “a cli­mate dis­as­ter wait­ing to hap­pen.” A change.org peti­tion oppos­ing Wil­low had drawn 3.1 mil­lion sig­na­tures and an esti­mat­ed 1.1 mil­lion unique let­ters have descend­ed on the White House.

Sen­a­tor Maria Cantwell, D‑Washington, a strate­gist behind recent pro-preser­va­tion deci­sions in Alas­ka, has warned of cli­mate con­se­quences to the Arc­tic that would be “irre­versible and irre­spon­si­ble to future gen­er­a­tions,” adding: “Oil com­pa­nies already have record prof­its and access to drilling rights on mil­lions of acres of pub­lic lands which they should be using to meet our cur­rent fos­sil fuel needs.”

As news orga­ni­za­tions pre­dict­ed approval of Wil­low, Sen­a­tor Jeff Merkley, D‑Oregon, tweet­ed on Fri­day: “It’s a com­plete betray­al of Biden’s promise not to allow more drilling and a com­plete cat­a­stro­phe to rein in cli­mate change.”

The Biden-Har­ris admin­is­tra­tion has deliv­ered a suc­ces­sion of pro-envi­ron­ment deci­sions in Alas­ka. It has used the Clean Water Act to reject a mas­sive open pit mine pro­posed between two of Bris­tol Bay’s major salmon spawn­ing streams. It has blocked fur­ther oil leas­ing in the Arc­tic Refuge. And it has rein­stat­ed the Clin­ton era “Road­less Rule,” block­ing con­struc­tion of new roads into old growth forests of South­east Alaska’s vast Ton­gass Nation­al Forest.

“We’ve had deci­sion after deci­sion go against us and even this one – a social­ly just project locat­ed with­in a petro­le­um reserve – it’s per­ilous­ly close,” Murkows­ki said in a recent speech to the Alas­ka State Leg­is­la­ture in Juneau.

The Wil­low Project was approved dur­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. But a fed­er­al judge sent agen­cies back to the draw­ing board, find­ing analy­sis of envi­ron­men­tal impacts inad­e­quate and incom­plete. The lands around Cono­coPhillips’ pro­posed drilling sites com­prise major migra­to­ry bird habi­tats – cen­tered on Teshekpuk Lake — and are home to a major cari­bou herd, accord­ing to the BLM.

The Bureau of Land Man­age­ment, in scal­ing back drilling sites, reduced by forty per­cent the impact on polar bear habitat.

But Wil­low will have impacts. The BLM’s pre­ferred alter­na­tive would mean con­struc­tion of thir­ty miles of grav­el roads, 268 miles of indi­vid­ual pipelines, plus 431 miles of ice roads. The exist­ing Trans-Alas­ka Pipeline would be used to ship oil south across Alas­ka to the oil port in Valdez.

Cono­coPhillips had esti­mat­ed the Wil­low site con­tains six hun­dred mil­lion bar­rels of oil. The cost of the project is esti­mat­ed in the $6–8 bil­lion range.

It would cre­ate about 2,500 large­ly union con­struc­tion jobs, and gen­er­ate an esti­mat­ed $17 bil­lion in rev­enue to the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, state of Alas­ka, and Alas­ka Native corporations.

It would, how­ev­er, yield 9.2 mil­lion met­ric tons of car­bon diox­ide emis­sions a year, at a time when the Arc­tic is warm­ing at a rate four times that of the rest of the plan­et. “I expect the unex­pect­ed and that our land will be com­plete­ly unpre­dictable, in many ways, unknown to us because it’s chang­ing so fast that our ani­mals and our peo­ple can­not adopt,” in words of Siqiniq Maupin, a native of the area and direc­tor of Sov­er­eign Inu­pi­at for a Liv­ing Arctic.

The basic ratio­nale for Wil­low: The Unit­ed States will need oil, even as it tran­si­tions out of fos­sil fuel dependence.

As the BLM not­ed in its lat­est review, we can pro­duce that oil domes­ti­cal­ly, or pur­chase it from coun­tries with far less rig­or­ous envi­ron­men­tal protection.

“We are decades away from a time that we would be beyond oil resources: The need is very very much still there,” Murkows­ki recent­ly argued.

If the Unit­ed States approves a big new oil project, how­ev­er, what mes­sage does it send to the rest of the world.

“The pol­lu­tion it would gen­er­ate will not only put Alas­ka natives and oth­er local com­mu­ni­ties at risk, it is incom­pat­i­ble with the ambi­tion we need to achieve a net zero future,” for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Al Gore argued on Friday.

The Wil­low Project deci­sion is, in a phrase made famous by Joe Biden, a big (exple­tive) deal.