One Year Later, ANWR’s Potential Hasn’t Gone Away

January 21, 2022

Within hours after his inauguration, President Joe Biden had killed the hopes, dreams and income streams of tens of thousands of Americans.

Cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, and the 11,000-plus jobs helping to build it, was a crushing blow to workers up and down the Midwestern states.  Less discussed nationally were the potential jobs associated with the safe development of the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) on Alaska’s North Slope.  With one executive action and stroke of the President’s pen, he placed a moratorium on any extractive activities there.

One pro-development organization notes that full development of ANWR brings the potential of up to 736,000 jobs nationally; a figure definitely aggressive and lessened by the much smaller, 12-parcel lease sale held at the end of 2020.  Still, those leases hold the potential for thousands of jobs for Alaskans, and tens of thousands of support and manufacturing jobs across the nation.

In the late 1990s, ANWR was estimated to contain five to twelve billion barrels of recoverable oil, and with modern seismic and exploratory techniques able to locate additional pockets of oil, that estimate may increase significantly.  Given today’s high oil prices and the pinch everyone is feeling with petroleum-related purchases, ANWR needs to be front-of-mind when Americans think of how to increase domestic production.

Power The Future will never stop fighting for Alaska’s energy potential – its jobs and impacts to energy and national security – and encourage our supporters to continue to use your voice to speak out against the efforts of President Biden and others, who seek to crush Americans’ dreams.