The Trump administration did not receive a single bid for its offer of new offshore oil and gas exploration opportunities in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, dealing a blow to President Trump’s ‘drill, baby drill,’ agenda.
The attempted sale of rights to drill in more than 1 million acres was the first of six offshore oil and gas auctions in Alaska that Republicans mandated last year when they passed Mr. Trump’s sweeping tax law.
It was seen as a key test of the industry’s appetite for investment in a state that Mr. Trump has called a “natural resource warehouse,” and essential for his “energy dominance” agenda of maximizing domestic production of oil, natural gas and coal. On Wednesday, though, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management acknowledged that no drilling companies submitted bids.
“This is a huge embarrassment for Trump’s Alaska fossil fuel fantasy,” said Cooper Freeman, the Alaska director of the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group.
Matthew Giacona, the acting director of the bureau, did not address why the auction was a flop. He said in a statement that a predictable leasing schedule mandated by Congress is “the foundation for maintaining domestic energy production.”
“Even when a sale receives no bids, maintaining a transparent, congressionally mandated schedule keeps Cook Inlet opportunities available for future investment, strengthens national readiness and supports Alaska’s role in meeting America’s energy needs,” Mr. Giacona said.
The Cook Inlet stretches about 180 miles from the Gulf of Alaska inland, separating the Kenai Peninsula from Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city. The waters have long been considered a critical basin, but experts have said its resources have been dwindling for decades. Retrieving that gas has also gotten more difficult and expensive, leaving fewer companies interested in the search.
That hasn’t stopped supporters of oil and gas development from insisting on giving drillers the opportunity to explore there.
In 2022, the Biden administration tried to cancel a lease in the Cook Inlet, citing a lack of interest from the industry. Republicans in Congress reacted with anger.
At the time, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, called the Biden administration’s claims “nothing more than fantasy from an administration that shuns U.S. energy production.” Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska, accused the Biden administration of “blatantly lying to the American people.”
Ms. Murkowski and Mr. Sullivan did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.
Ultimately, the Biden administration did hold an auction in the Cook Inlet in 2022 as part of a compromise with lawmakers to pass its own sweeping tax and climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The offer attracted one bid, from Hilcorp, a Houston-based energy company. Hilcorp owns several other leases in the Cook Inlet, none of which are currently producing oil or gas.
Still, when Republicans muscled Mr. Trump’s tax law through Congress last year with no Democratic votes, they included a schedule to hold more than 30 offshore oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Cook Inlet over the next 15 years.
The Interior Department called the first Alaska auction the “Big Beautiful Cook Inlet 1 (BBC1) Oil and Gas Lease Sale.” It opened on Feb. 2, and bids were due on Tuesday.
The next auction in the Cook Inlet is scheduled for March 2027.
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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