Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Received No Drilling Bids

• Jan. 8, 2025Updated 11:53 a.m. ET

One of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s biggest “drill, baby, drill” initiatives suffered a significant setback on Wednesday as the Interior Department announced that a lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ended without a single bidder.

The sale, which was required by Congress, marks the second time in four years that an effort to auction oil and gas leases in the pristine wilderness — home to migrating caribou, polar bears, musk oxen, millions of birds and other wildlife — has been a flop.

The repeated failures suggest that oil companies are either not interested in drilling in the refuge or do not think it’s worth the cost, despite insistence by Mr. Trump and many Republican lawmakers that the refuge should be opened up for drilling. The Biden administration offered 400,000 acres after shaving off one million acres from the original boundaries to avoid areas crucial to the polar bear and Porcupine caribou populations.

“The lack of interest from oil companies in development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge reflects what we and they have known all along: There are some places too special and sacred to exploit with oil and gas drilling,” Laura Daniel-Davis, the acting deputy secretary of the Interior Department, said in a statement.

Some Alaska lawmakers and officials, including the governor, had said before the sale that the decision by the Biden administration to shrink the leasing area would guarantee failure. Republican lawmakers have said that the wilderness area would generate a multibillion-dollar windfall as soon as drillers were allowed inside the refuge.

But Ms. Daniel-Davis noted that the oil and gas industry is “sitting on millions of acres of undeveloped leases elsewhere” and should pursue those first. “We’d suggest that’s a prudent place to start, rather than engage further in speculative leasing in one of the most spectacular places in the world,” she said.