ConocoPhillips has sued the Biden Administration over its ban on oil and gas leases in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. The lawsuit is similar to other ones that have been filed in recent days by the State of Alaska and the North Slope Borough, as well as the pro-oil group Voice of the Arctic Inupiat.
ConocoPhillips says the Bureau of Land Management final rule cutting off one half of the petroleum reserve from development violates the federal law that compels oil development in the NPR-A.
“In promulgating the Rules, BLM has attempted to override and evade clear Congressional mandates, changing the management priority for the Petroleum Reserve from expeditious leasing and production to meet the Nation’s energy needs to creating ‘maximum protection’ of surface values and prohibiting development activities,” the lawsuit says. “BLM ignored Congress’ direction and made a unilateral policy choice that 13 million acres of the Petroleum Reserve are ‘too special to develop’ for oil and gas and should instead be preserved as wilderness areas, and gave itself unlimited authority to expand those ‘too special’ 13 million acres at will.”
In establishing the reserve, President Warren Harding and Congress said it should be used for “expeditious production of oil to meet the nation’s energy needs,” ConocoPhillips says. NPR-A contains an estimated 8.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil, according to a 2017 assessment by the US Geological Survey.
Congress “plainly did not authorize BLM to promulgate sweeping regulations that thwart and prevent the production of petroleum throughout the NPR-A,” ConocoPhillips says. Yet, the rule contains “numerous new provisions that elevate resource preservation over energy production and effectively turn the petroleum reserve into a de facto wilderness area in which development is outright prohibited.”
ConocoPhillips’ Alaska unit holds 1.8 million acres of state and federal leases in Alaska, including one million of undeveloped acres as of the end of 2023, the lawsuit says.
Oil companies North Slope Exploration LLC and North Slope Energy LLC, which hold leases of more than 552,000 acres in the reserve, also filed similar lawsuits.
The case is ConocoPhillips v. Department of Interior, 24-cv-00142, filed in the U.S. District Court, District of Alaska. It has been assigned to Chief Justice Sharon Gleason, who often sides with the government and environmental industry.
