On April 17, 2026, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), within the Department of the Interior (DOI), announced that it will hold an oil and gas lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) on June 5, 2026. This will be first out of a total of four sales mandated by the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBBA, P.L. 119-21). The details of the sale are not yet available. A sale notice will be published in the Federal Register on Monday.

Although the first sale mandated under OBBBA, this June 2026 sale is not the first sale held in the Arctic Refuge. Two previous lease sales, which were mandated by the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, were originally estimated to bring taxpayers almost $1 billion in revenue but fell far short of this projection. The first lease sale, held in January 2021, brought in just $16.5 million. The second lease sale, held in January 2025, attracted no bidders and generated no revenue.

The economics of developing the Arctic Refuge has not fundamentally changed since then. Drilling in a remote and sensitive region with little to no supporting infrastructure makes both the oil and gas industry and its wall street investors hesitant to participate. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Congress's nonpartisan scorekeeper, estimated that OBBBA-mandated lease sales will generate $452 million in revenue for federal taxpayers over the next ten years, from FY2025 to 2034—far lower than the initial $1 billion revenue estimate from when the ANWR oil and gas program was first authorized. However, even this revised score could be too rosy—TCS now projects that future ANWR lease sales are likely to generate between just $3 and $30 million in federal revenue.

In response to today's notice of sale, TCS Vice President Autumn Hanna issued the following statement: 

"Here we go again. When Congress authorized drilling in the Arctic Refuge we knew it was going to be a high–risk, low–reward prospect for taxpayers—and the reality has been even worse. The industry isn't interested, the revenue promises are inflated, and taxpayers have much more to lose than gain. We're being sold a bill of goods when it comes to drilling in remote places like the Refuge. It won't help consumers facing higher gas prices, and if we keep trying to sweeten the pot to make these leases attractive to oil interests, we could saddle taxpayers with dangerous liabilities and the consequences of reckless development."

Background

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is the largest refuge within the National Wildlife Refuge System. In the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Congress authorized a federal program to manage the "leasing, development, production, and transportation of oil and gas in and from the Coastal Plain" of the Arctic Refuge, an area that contains approximately 1.5 million acres of non-Wilderness federal land. Specifically, Congress required DOI to hold an initial lease sale by December 22, 2021, and a second lease sale by December 22, 2024, with each sale offering at least 400,000 acres.

The ANWR oil and gas program was proposed as a revenue raiser to offset the 2017 tax bill's $1.9 trillion price tag. The CBO originally estimated that the two lease sales would generate $1.82 billion in total over 10 years, resulting in $910 million in federal revenue­ as half would be shared with the state of Alaska­. However, actual revenue from the first oil and gas lease sale was less than 1 percent of what Congress and the CBO promised, generating just $16.5 million in total revenue. AIDEA, a public corporation of the State of Alaska, had to step in to bid on leases due to the lack of industry interest.

In 2022, the only 2 private companies that acquired leases—Knik Arm Services LLC and Regenerate Alaska—requested to rescind them. Major U.S. banks—including Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, and Chase—and insurance companies­—including Chubb—have also announced they will no longer finance or insure oil businesses in the Arctic Refuge. In September 2023, the DOI rescinded the seven remaining leases in ANWR due to serious flaws and legal deficiencies in the previous Administration's environmental analysis.

On December 9, 2024, DOI announced that it would hold the second congressionally mandated Arctic Refuge oil and gas lease sale in January 2025. The lease sale offered 400,000 acres of federal land—the congressionally mandated minimum—for oil and gas development. The area only included the acres projected to have a high potential for oil and gas resources, much of which was originally leased in the January 2021 lease sale but later rescinded. The auction received no bids.

Despite the outcomes of these two lease sales, both Congress and the Administration have moved forward with oil and gas leasing in the Refuge. The FY2025 reconciliation bill, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBBA), again mandated four new oil and gas lease sales in the Refuge: the first 1 year after the bill's enactment (7/4/2026), the second within 3 years (7/4/2028), the third within 5 years (7/4/2030), and the fourth within 7 years (7/4/2032). Each sale must offer no fewer than 400,000 acres — roughly a quarter of the 1.56-million-acres open to oil and gas development.

The CBO (preliminarily) estimated that mandated lease sales would generate $452 million in revenue for federal taxpayers over the next ten years, from FY2025 to 2034. While significantly lower that its previous estimate of  $946 million—which was based on the House-passed language—these numbers are still likely overinflated. Based on the 20-year average bid levels for state and federal leases on Alaska's North Slope region, TCS now projects that—even under ideal conditions—future ANWR lease sales are likely to generate between just $3 and $30 million in federal revenue.

The lease sales will also come with discounted royalty rate, as OBBBA reduced the onshore oil and gas royalty from 16.67% to 12.5%. OBBBA further mandates that these lease sales follow the same terms and conditions as included in the development plan issued by the first Trump administration in 2020, which allowed leasing across the entire Coastal Plain with minimal restrictions on surface-disturbing activities.

Despite sweetening the deal, the economics of drilling in the Arctic has not fundamentally changed. Leasing public lands for oil and gas development in a remote and sensitive region is unlikely to bring a significant boost in oil supply or relief at the pump now or in the long run. Instead, drilling in ANWR would shift future administrative costs and environmental liabilities onto taxpayers— impacting outdoor recreationists, hunters, and anglers, and the general public.