Biden Administration Creates Final Limits for Oil Drillers in Alaska

The Biden administration announced new protections for 1.3 million acres in the North Slope of Alaska, a final effort to shield it from oil companies eager to drill in the ecologically sensitive Arctic environment.

President-elect Donald J. Trump returns to the White House on Monday, and he has pledged to grant fossil fuel companies broad access to American land and federal waters. The new protections, which take effect immediately, create a legal hurdle that could slow down, though probably not stop, efforts by the Trump administration to expand drilling in part of the North Slope known as the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

The reserve is the largest expanse of undisturbed land in the United States. It is an important nesting ground for migratory birds, home to caribou, grizzly bears and wolverines and is an important habitat for polar bears. It also contains large reserves of oil and gas and was created in 1923 as a source of oil for the Navy. Some exploratory drilling took place over the decades but it was largely left untouched until the late 1990s.

Laura Daniel-Davis, the acting deputy secretary of the Interior Department, said that, under the new policy, the Bureau of Land Management would have to explain how drilling in the protected areas would affect subsistence hunting and fishing in the vast wilderness.

The agency also is proposing about three million acres of new or expanded “special areas,” regions that have ecological significance or are used for subsistence hunting and gathering by Alaska Natives. The decisions were based on 88,000 comments from people in North Slope communities, she said.

“I can’t speculate what the future might hold with regard to a new team,” Ms. Daniel-Davis said of the Trump administration. But she said the Interior Department was obliged to act after conducting extensive consultations.

Some of the newly protected and proposed areas are close to the Willow oil project, led by ConocoPhillips.

Environmental groups applauded the move. Erik Grafe, an attorney for Earthjustice, said the new measures “followed the science that clearly shows these areas’ irreplaceable values require maximum protection against harm from oil drilling.”

Republican lawmakers said they would try to reverse the Biden administration’s actions. They accused the Interior Department of laying the groundwork for environmental groups to challenge the Trump administration’s plans to increase drilling.

The Biden administration had already banned this drilling in about 13 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. That amounts to about half of the entire reserve.

It also blocked a proposed industrial road needed to mine copper in the middle of the state, and barred drilling in Alaska waters, including the Northern Bering Sea.

“I don’t think that is what Alaska wants,” Representative Bruce Westerman, Republican of Arkansas and the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said. He said Republicans would seek to mandate drilling leases in Alaska waters and on the North Slope as lawmakers wrote a budget bill in the coming weeks.

Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska, called the move a “last gasp of a failed administration trying to crush Alaska and silence the voices of the Inupiat people who actually live on the North Slope.”