Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority v. U.S. Department of the Interior

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The federal district court for the District of Alaska vacated the Biden administration’s September 2023 cancellation of Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil and gas leases. The Biden administration had canceled the leases—which were entered into at the end of the first Trump administration—based on the U.S. Department of the Interior’s conclusion that the leases were “unlawful in the inception” due to legal defects in the environmental review, including failure to adequately quantify downstream greenhouse gas emissions. In its decision vacating the cancellation, the court held that the Interior Department failed to follow the procedure mandated by the implementing regulations of the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act of 1976 for lease cancellations, which require a court order and which the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made applicable to the ANWR Coastal Plain oil and gas program.

The plaintiff filed a response to the defendants' status report regarding the ANWR oil and gas lease sale for which no bids were received by the deadline of January 6, 2025. The plaintiff contested the Department of the Interior's attribution for the lack of interest to recognition by industry that ANWR is too environmentally sensitive for oil drilling. The plaintiff stated: "DOI is mistaken. No one bid in the second ANWR oil and gas sale because DOI rewrote the operational rules so restrictively that no one could viably bid." The plaintiff further stated that it "stands ready and willing to conduct lawful, environmentally-appropriate oil and gas activities if the Court overturns DOI’s unlawful cancellation of the leases that DOI issued AIDEA in January 2021 in the first lease sale, to fulfill the mandate of the Tax Act."