ANWR coastal plain lease sale draws $3.7 million in bids
Only five tracts drew bids in ANWR’s coastal plain sale, and major oil companies stayed away. For North Slope leaders, the weak turnout raises fresh doubts about jobs and borough revenues.
A thin bidding pool in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain left the North Slope with a familiar question: whether the long-promised drilling push is still gathering momentum, or losing it. The June 5 sale brought in $3,741,528 in winning bids, but only five tracts drew interest, and the only bidders were the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority and HEX Energy LLC.
That matters far beyond the auction room. Supporters in Kaktovik and across the North Slope have long argued that development in the Beaufort Sea frontier could bring more oil-tax dollars to the North Slope Borough, money that helps pay for schools, water systems and other public services in one of the most expensive places in Alaska to run government. A sale with no major oil companies in the mix suggests those future revenue and employment bets may be farther off than backers had hoped.
The Bureau of Land Management offered 58 tracts totaling about 688,829 acres in the Coastal Plain, a 1.56-million-acre stretch of land that includes calving grounds for the Porcupine Caribou Herd. The agency said the sale was the first lease sale for the area under the Working Families Tax Cuts and the first of at least four it must hold by 2035, with at least 400,000 acres offered in each required sale. The largest winning bid was $1.7 million, and 50% of the lease-sale revenue goes to the state of Alaska by law.
The weak result was especially stark when set against earlier expectations for ANWR and against a March 2026 National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska lease sale that brought in nearly $164 million from companies including ConocoPhillips and Repsol. This was the third ANWR lease sale since 2021. The January 6, 2021 sale drew bids from only two oil developers and AIDEA, while a January 2025 sale produced no bids at all.
BLM Alaska State Director Kevin Pendergast called the sale a “major milestone” and said the region had remained a frontier area. But critics said the muted response showed the refuge remains unattractive to big industry. The National Wildlife Federation said the absence of major bidders confirmed that drilling in the Arctic Refuge is not the answer to current energy challenges and would threaten wildlife and the Gwich’in people, while Earthjustice said the repeated lack of interest showed the financial risk of drilling there.
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