Biden Approves Controversial 30-Year Oil Drilling Deal 

By Dana Malcolm 

Staff writer 

#USA, March 14, 2023 – The Biden Administration, on Monday approved a 30-year $8 billion oil drilling project to the dismay of climate activists.  

ConocoPhillips, Alaska’s largest crude oil producer, initiated the drilling Project called the Willow Master Development Plan.  The Government has agreed and will allow the company to develop leases it has had since the late 1990s. 

The environmentalists’ concerns about the drilling project included: potential damage to the environment and destruction of calving grounds for the local Caribou, which Alaskan natives depend upon. 

The Biden Administration, in an attempt to justify the decision says it has given ConocoPhillips only three of the five drill sites it wanted.  

“[This] significantly scales back the Willow Project within the constraints of valid existing rights under decades-old leases issued by prior Administrations,” a press release from the Department of Interior said, stating that it ‘reduces the project’s freshwater use and eliminates all infrastructure related to the two rejected drill sites’.  

In addition, the administration is promising to limit, but not completely stop the drilling of oil in special areas in Alaska and designate 2,800,000 acres in the Arctic Ocean as completely off-limits. 

Greenpeace says the American Government is relying on hasty and inefficient analysis to assess the potential impacts that the proposal would have on local communities. 

The three-decade-long project comes as the US promises to cut its non-renewable energy use massively by 2030.  

The United States is leading in the Western Hemisphere when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions; a nation which shares its neighbourhood with the Caribbean, a bloc of countries struggling against the debilitating and destabilising effects of global warming.