US to Auction Almost 1 Million Acres Off Alaska for Oil Drilling

The Biden administration plans to offer hundreds of thousands of acres off the coast of Alaska for new oil and gas drilling next month, a sale mandated in Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act to win the support of holdout West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin.

The auction of more than 958,000 acres in Alaska’s Cook Inlet next month, announced by the Interior Department Monday, could produce nearly 200 million barrels of crude and 300 billion cubic feet of natural gas over the lifetime of the lease sales, according to department estimates, though it’s debatable whether any drilling will actually occur.