No major oil companies participated in the Trump administration's sale of drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Wednesday.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) today received 13 bids on 12 tracts covering 552,802 acres at the first oil and gas lease sale for the Coastal Plain of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The bids, totalling more than $14.4 million, were opened during a video livestream event.

The bids are currently under review. The State of Alaska will receive 50% of the accepted bid receipts, according to the BLM.

The BLM offered 22 tracts, spanning about 1.1 million acres of the eligible 1.56 million acres designated for oil and gas development.

The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) was the sole bidder on much of the acreage.

In an emergency meeting in December, the state agency was authorised to allocate up to $20 million for the evaluation and posting of bids in the sale. According to AIDEA, it intends to partner with private companies to develop the leases.

US Department of Interior Secretary David Bernhardt in August approved the leasing programme in the 19-million-acre ANWR. He said the move was mandated via the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed by Congress in 2017, which opened the area to oil and gas leasing.

While the sale generated millions of dollars in high bids, it did fall short of a 2019 Congressional Budget Office estimate that predicted gross receipts from the two mandated ANWR lease sales would reach $1.8 billion over a decade, with the first lease sale expected to produce the highest bids.

The sale’s lacklustre results were sure to be a disappointment among those supporters of the state’s multi-decade pursuit to open the ANWR to drilling.

US Senator Lisa Murkowski acknowledged those efforts, adding that this first lease sale “did not occur under ideal conditions, but it will benefit Alaskans both in the short-term and well into the future.”

The rest of the ANWR, or about 92% of the area, remains off limits to drilling.

Exploration

Alaska lease sale brings few bids