In December 2017, the passage of Public Law 115-97 required the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to establish and administer a competitive oil and natural gas program for the leasing, development, production, and transportation of oil and natural gas in and from the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Previously, ANWR was effectively under a drilling moratorium. Three sensitivity cases in EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2018 explore the effect of this law on U.S. crude oil production . Much uncertainty surrounds any projection of production from ANWR. The only well drilled in the coastal plain was completed in 1986, and the results have remained confidential. Federal resource estimates are based largely on the oil productivity of geologic formations in neighboring state-owned lands in Alaska and two-dimensional seismic data that had been collected by a petroleum industry consortium in 1984 and 1985. Source: U.S. Geological Survey ANWR […]