The Willow Oil Drilling Project is estimated to extract millions of barrels of oil from Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. This reserve will be located in Alaska’s remote North Slope, 23 million square area of undisturbed public land. This project was proposed by a company called Conoco Phillips, aiming to pump 600 million barrels of oil over a 30-year period.
This project was first approved by the Trump administration in 2020. Later, in 2021, Sharon Gleason, a US federal judge, reversed that decision due to it not having any proper environmental analysis. The Biden administration, however, repassed a scaled-down version of the same project in December 2022.
The passing of the project sparked a lot of controversy and backlash. Many environmentalists opposed it because it would affect the wildlife and their migration patterns. The project has also been called a ‘carbon bomb’ by many media channels and environmentalists (like Wendy Wendlandt). The Willow Project has also gotten opposition from nearby towns and Nuiqsut, an Alaskan city because it would cause numerous harms. The community already has to deal with gas leaks, oil spills, and toxic pollution from existing oil and gas infrastructure. This situation also gained a lot of attention on various social media platforms with the hashtag- #stopwillow
On the other hand, the Alaskan government and business establishments are in favor of the project as the Alaskan Oil Industry has been on the decline. The North Slope has many indigenous tribes and their native leaders are also in favor of the project as it will increase revenue and employment opportunities.
‘No more drilling on federal lands. Period.’ is what the so-called pro-climate President Biden had promised. This project undermines all the previous work and progress towards the use of renewable energy. Moreover, Conoco Phillips was ranked as the 14th most polluting company in the world. The revised version of the Willow Oil Drilling Project isn't much different from the original project proposed by Conoco Phillips.
The latest justification for the project is that The Willow Project will ease energy prices exacerbated by the Russia-Ukraine War with all 3 drills producing only 180,000 barrels of oil daily, which amounts to 0.2% of the daily global oil production. These statistics do not seem to change and help with the increasing oil prices, making the execution of the project baseless altogether.
In my opinion, and many others, with the next presidential election coming up soon, Joe Biden is trying to gain the support of neutral voters. President Biden is trying to show that he is looking out for the common man and hence wants to reduce oil prices.
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