Trump officials rush to auction off rights to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before Biden can..

[modrepub]

36. 2 Problems With This Approach

First, I'd be wary of any lease this administration put together in haste. There's bound to be some administrative slip up that will be tied up in court making the lease a money suck.

Second, a lease only allows you to extract the oil. It doesn't cover any permitting costs or cover all of the costs to develop the oil field. Developing an oil field in the Arctic is expensive. We probably talking many tens of billions of dollars. Oil companies, if you haven't heard, are not the financial juggernauts they used to be. A lot of oil companies have gone bankrupt or dropped off the main stock indexes. They will have difficulty pledging their stock as collateral and most banks will increase their lending interest rates to offset the chance that the oil field won't pan out.

Bottom line, they can have the leases. But they're taking a chance this maladministration screwed up on the lease guaranteeing themselves years of litigation. And in the end, they probably don't have the financing to develop the field any time in the near future.