Alaska National Wildlife Refuge oil lease auction results were 'damningly disappointing.'
...this is so like everything Trump has done.
Sheldon Whitehouse @SenWhitehouse 11m
As some predicted, this ‘self-selection process for worst company’ produced no major corporate bidders. They can’t sell existing reserves. This stuff would be expensive. And identify you as a horrible company, to boot.
from Houston Chronicle:
____The auction results were damningly disappointing. Congress had mandated drilling in the refuge to help pay for President Donald Trump’s debt-accelerating 2017 tax cuts. Advocates promised that wells in ANWR would generate $1 billion a year and decrease the budget deficit.
The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority was the only bidder on 400,000 acres at the minimum price of $25 an acre. The state-owned economic development organization has never drilled a well.
Two small companies, neither of which produces a significant amount of oil, were the sole bidders on another 75,000 acres. Analysts cannot imagine how they could launch an exploratory drilling program, particularly because major U.S. banks have promised to never finance drilling in the refuge.
The Bureau of Land Management received no bids on about half the tracts on offer. The total cash haul was a measly $14.4 million. Unless the leaseholders can seduce a supermajor oil company to self-finance a multi-billion-dollar drilling campaign that will take a decade to pay off, the refuge remains safe.
read more: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/The-failed-auction-of-oil-leases-in-Alaskan-15865655.php
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