Interior Department Denies Offshore Drilling Lease Extensions For Beaufort Sea’s Liberty Unit

The following is courtesy of the Center for Biological Diversity:

Arctic Win: Interior Department Denies Lease Extension for ‘Liberty’ Offshore Drilling Project in Alaska

ANCHORAGE, Alaska— The Department of the Interior published a decision today denying an extension of offshore oil and gas leases for the Liberty Unit in the Beaufort Sea. The leases were held by Hilcorp Alaska, which had been trying to develop the leases under the Liberty Project. Today’s denial of a “Suspension of Production” request means Hilcorp’s Liberty Unit leases will now expire.

“This reckless offshore drilling project has been doomed from the start, and I hope this is finally the end of the Liberty fantasy,” said Cooper Freeman, Alaska director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which has been fighting the Liberty project for decades. “From poor planning and a lack of local support to high-risk bets and weak science, Liberty has been a terrifying fiasco. The bowhead whales, polar bears, and ice seals that rely on a healthy Arctic marine ecosystem would be severely threatened by this dangerous drilling project, and I’m glad the Interior Department agreed.”

The Center sent a letter to Interior in July urging the agency to deny the lease extensions, stating that an extension is not in the national interest.

The Liberty project would have been the first oil development project fully within federal waters in the Arctic Ocean, creating massive risk for the Arctic ecosystem. The project would have involved a nine-acre artificial island with a 24-acre footprint and a 5.6-mile pipeline to bring the oil to onshore pipelines.

After many years of advocating against the Liberty Project, the Center and allied groups successfully fought its Trump-era approval in court in 2020. At that time the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that the federal government, in approving it, had violated the Endangered Species Act by inadequately assessing harms to polar bears from the project and violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to properly analyze the project’s contributions to climate change.

“Cleaning up an oil spill in the Arctic Ocean is impossible and could devastate cultural and ecological keystone species like bowhead whales,” said Freeman. “Hilcorp’s record of spills, leaks, and accidents speaks for itself, and we shouldn’t sacrifice the Arctic to fill the pockets of shameless Texas oil barons. Oil and gas drilling is antithetical to a healthy Arctic Ocean, and we’ll keep fighting to make sure it never happens in our federal waters.”

BP discovered the Liberty oilfield in 1997 and began working to realize the project in 1998. After the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, it ran into roadblocks and eventually sold the project assets to Hilcorp.

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.7 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.