from local leaders and some tribes for the economic boost it could provide but has been criticized by environmentalists and other Alaska Native groups who are concerned about the scale of greenhouse gas emissions and impacts on local wildlife.
from local leaders and some tribes for the economic boost it could provide but has been criticized by environmentalists and other Alaska Native groups who are concerned about the scale of greenhouse gas emissions and impacts on local wildlife.
CASPER — President Joe Biden’s approval of an $8 billion oil project in Alaska reflects a shift away from his campaign promises to stop drilling on federal lands. But it aligns more closely with the actions his administration has taken over the last two years — and probably won’t lead to any major regulatory changes in Wyoming.
The decision to let the Willow Project move forward has been criticized heavily by environmental groups for allowing the extraction of hundreds of millions of barrels of oil, and the associated carbon emissions, over the coming decades.
Oil and gas industry groups, meanwhile, believe the Biden administration still isn’t doing enough to support U.S. energy producers.
“I think the Biden administration is trying to appease the anti oil and gas allies that he has, that helped get him elected, but also coming to terms with the reality that oil and gas is a necessary and vital part of the energy mix for the United States,” said Ryan McConnaughey, vice president of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming.
Rob Godby, an economics professor at the University of Wyoming, said the landmark approval does reflect the reality that the U.S. is still using a lot of oil and gas and will continue to do so for at least a little while.
“We’re going to have to have oil and gas development,” he said. “I think it’s just going to be — under what conditions, and what types of risks are the developers willing to face with respect to potential emissions policies or how their markets potentially go away?”
The Biden administration has allowed much more oil and gas leasing and development to advance than many voters originally hoped.
A significant proportion of those admissions, though, have been won in court by the oil and gas industry. Challenges to repeated missed oil and gas lease sales — which federal officials blamed largely on the need to redo environmental reviews deemed unlikely to hold up to judicial scrutiny — resulted in a patchwork of rulings in different states.
Those outcomes, along with new incentives to hold lease sales included in the Inflation Reduction Act, appear to have motivated the administration to resume something resembling quarterly leasing.
Federal lease sales are currently expected to take place in Wyoming during the second and third (but not first) quarters of 2023.
The Bureau of Land Management announced on March 10 that it will accept public comment on 115 parcels proposed for the third-quarter sale until April 7.
“The Biden administration’s never going to make anyone happy,” Godby said. “On the left, any development is probably too much for some people. On the right, there’ll never be enough.”
He emphasized that the political and economic circumstances that led Biden to voluntarily authorize the project in Alaska won’t necessarily translate to any other oil and gas proposal in the lower 48 states.
“I don’t know that this sets a precedent for or against federal lands. I think that’s going to probably be determined a little more locally,” he said.
Wyoming’s high proportion of federal lands leaves companies here particularly exposed to decisions about leasing and drilling made at the federal level, McConnaughey said.
“Some of the policies that have been put in place have an outsized impact on producers in Wyoming,” he said. (The Inflation Reduction Act, which also raises the costs associated with operating on newly leased federal lands, remains a sore spot for the state’s oil and gas industry.)
McConnaughey noted, though, that a range of different factors affect the industry’s decisions about where and when to drill — like oil prices, which are set globally, and inflation.
For now, the industry is still waiting to see “whether or not companies decide to invest in Wyoming, where they have to deal with the federal government,” he said, or if “they will shift some of those resources to states that have a higher percentage of state and private lands available for drilling.”
