The US Bureau of Land Management has received no bids for the oil and gas lease sale for the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Arctic Refuge) in Alaska (US). The lease sale was required by the 2017 Tax Act, which mandated the BLM to hold two lease sales in the Coastal Plain within seven years of enactment.
The first sale, conducted in January 2021, also demonstrated low interest, yielding US$14m in high bids and issuing 10-year leases on nine tracts covering more than 430,000 acres (174,000 hectares). Since that time, two of the issued leases have been cancelled and refunded at the request of the lessees (oil companies) and the remaining seven oil and gas leases issued to the Alaska Industrial and Export Authority (AIDEA) in the Coastal Plain were cancelled in September 2023 due to legal deficiencies in the underlying record. There are currently no existing leases in the Coastal Plain.
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