The Biden administration has green-lit a scaled-back version of the $8 billion Willow oil field development project, angering climate activists while delighting lawmakers from Alaska who have been battling to secure the project.
On Monday, the Department of the Interior (DOI) announced that it had approved three of the originally proposed five drilling pads by ConocoPhillips for the Willow project set within the 23 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A). The company acquired the leases in the late 1990s. ConocoPhillips will also relinquish rights to around 68,000 acres of its existing leases in the NPR-A.
The reduction of two drilling pads and relinquishment of 68,000 acres “reduces the project’s freshwater use and eliminates all infrastructure related to the two rejected drill sites, including approximately 11 miles of roads, 20 miles of pipelines, and 133 acres of gravel, all of which reduces potential impacts to caribou migration and subsistence users,” the DOI said in a press release on Mar. 13….