The Interior Department gave the green light Monday for US energy giant ConocoPhillips to drill for oil at three federally owned sites within the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska’s remote western Arctic.
Biden urged environmental groups, who in his 2020 presidential campaign promised not to approve new oil and gas development on federal land, to call it Project Willow.
The six groups that filed lawsuits in District Court accuse the Department of the Interior and other actions of violating the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and other laws under the council’s authority.
“The massive ConocoPhillips oil and gas project poses a real threat to Alaskan wildlife, ecosystems and communities,” said Mike Scott of the Sierra Club, one of the plaintiffs.
“If allowed to drill into the ground, the Willow Project would be a climate disaster, the effects of which would be felt for decades,” Scott added.
Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan echoed the Biden administration’s agreement Monday, saying legal efforts to stop the plan are pending.
“We are prepared to defend this decision by the legislature from the Lower 48 NGOs (editor’s note: the contiguous states of the Union, excluding Alaska and Hawaii), which have consistently tried to abolish the willow project.”
Alaska legislators have been working to approve the extraction plan, contending that it will be the source of several thousand jobs and support the industrial independence of the United States, since they will have a total production of 180,000 barrels of oil per day. .
The Willows Project will add 239 million metric tons of carbon emissions to the atmosphere over the next 30 years, according to Department of Interior estimates, equal to the annual emissions from 64 coal-fired power plants.
Biden has promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 compared to 2005, on track to reach a zero-emissions economy by 2050.
