The Willow Project is a decades long oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope in the National Petroleum Reserve. This area holds up to 600 million barrels of oil. This oil would take years to reach and would have a massive negative environmental impact. The company that started this is called ConocoPhilips, it is an energy company which has been drilling for oil in Alaska for years.
This project undermines US efforts to stop the use of fossil fuels worldwide, and it is estimated that the oil it will produce will release 9.2 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon pollution every year. This is the equivalent of two million additional gas-powered cars added to the roads. It will be next to impossible for the United States to achieve 50% reduction of emissions by 2030 (as was one of the environmental goals of the Biden Administration.)
On top of that, it would exacerbate the effects of global warming in Alaska, which has already been affected particularly badly compared to the rest of the world. It would be impossible to reverse the damage done to the environment if the amount of emissions estimated was released into our atmosphere. The Project could also provoke gas leaks that would further worsen its environmental impact.
More than a million letters of protest were written to the White House, and a Change.org petition demanding the end of the project collected more than 3 million signatures. These protests include activists who are indigenous to Alaska, despite the fact that all three lawmakers who represent Alaska in Congress, including a Democrat, campaigned for the project’s approval. They argued that it would help boost domestic energy production and lessen the country’s reliance on foreign oil.
On the 13th of March, Biden approved the project, despite the controversy surrounding it and the many protests and denouncements by climate change activists who said that this would be a mistake in terms of preserving our planet’s health. What made this more of a shocking decision, is that Biden has supported programs to protect the environment, including saying that there would be “no more drilling on federal lands, period.” while he was a candidate for the presidential elections in 2020. This statement even garnered him support from climate activists.
However, the Willow Project has proved to be a political issue as well as an environmental one. The Biden Administration felt its hands were tied in terms of approving the project because the company in charge of it already had existing leases in the area, and pressure from courts meant that they wouldn’t have been allowed to fully reject or reduce the project. The Biden Administration have tried to balance out these effects with new bans on oil and gas leasing in the Arctic Ocean, although it is very unlikely that these will have much effect on the emissions of the Willow Project.
There is hope that this project could at least be delayed, as Earthjustice is preparing to file a legal complaint against the Willow project on the basis that the Biden Administration’s authority to protect surface resources on Alaska’s public land includes reducing carbon pollution.
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