The US government on Monday approved a major oil project in Alaska, US giant ConocoPhillips’ Willow Project, sparking the ire of environmental activists in the United States who had launched a major campaign to speak out against its damaging effects on the climate to warn.
The project has been reduced to three drill areas down from the five originally requested by the company, but argued the Department of the Interior, which has jurisdiction over states in the United States.
The oil production will be located in an area called the National Petroleum Reserve in northwest Alaska. This is US state land when Democratic President Joe Biden came to power and vowed not to allow new oil and gas drilling on state land.
The approved project will produce 576 million barrels of oil over about 30 years, according to the ministry’s document. Overall, this leads to indirect emissions equivalent to 239 million tons of CO2.
According to a calculation tool from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), this corresponds to the emissions of 64 coal-fired power plants for one year. To give an order of magnitude: According to the EPA, the United States released the equivalent of 5.9 billion tons of CO2 in 2020.
At the same time, keen to make pledges to environmentalists, the US government has announced that it is working on additional safeguards for a vast swath of the national oil reserves. He also announced plans to permanently ban drilling over a large area of the Arctic Ocean bordering this reserve.
Defenders of the Willow project see it as a source of jobs and a contribution to energy independence in the United States.
ConocoPhillips, which acquired the concessions in the late 1990s, welcomed the government’s decision and agreed to “start road construction immediately.”
The facility will be constructed with “primarily manufactured and sourced materials from the United States and has the potential to create more than 2,500 construction jobs and approximately 300 long-term jobs,” the company added.
But environmental organizations denounce a climate catastrophe.
“Willow will be one of the largest oil and gas operations on public land in the country,” environmental organization Sierra Club said Monday. “The carbon pollution it will release into the air will have devastating effects on our people, wildlife and the climate. We will suffer the consequences for decades to come.”
For days, a wave of videos against the project rushed through the social network TikTok, and an online petition had collected more than 3.2 million signatures.
On the contrary, Alaskan elected officials in the United States Congress welcomed the news. “One can almost literally feel Alaska’s future brightening up,” Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said in a statement. “We are now on the verge of creating thousands of new jobs and generating billions of dollars in new revenue,” she added.
The battle over Project Willow has been going on for years. It was originally approved by the Trump administration before being temporarily halted in 2021 by a judge who sent it back for further government review.
At the beginning of February, the state administration office published its environmental analysis of the project, in which it detailed a “preferred alternative” – the one ultimately chosen – with three drill sites.
In particular, this solution makes it possible to reduce the impact on the migration of caribou, the ministry argued. And to better meet Joe Biden’s greenhouse gas emission reduction goals, he asserted.
The Democratic President has pledged to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by 50-52% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. A target set as part of the Paris Climate Agreement to enable the world’s largest economy to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
In a statement, Earthjustice president Abigail Dillen pointed to an apparent contradiction: “We know President Biden understands the existential climate threat, but he is endorsing a project that derails his own climate commitments.”