House passes bill overturning DOI rule blocking oil and gas on 13 million acres in Alaska

The House Wednesday passed a bill that would reverse the Biden administration’s decision to block 13 million acres of public land in Alaska from oil and gas drilling.

The Alaska’s Right to Produce Act of 2023, which was sponsored by Rep. Pete Stauber, R-Minn., passed 214-199, with five Democrats voting in favor of the bill and one Republican voting against it.

The Interior Department announced earlier this month that it would limit future oil and gas drilling on 13 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), which included a complete prohibition on new leasing on half of the reserve. Native Alaskans called the decision “categorically unjust.”

“Since the Biden administration announced this decision in September, our voices, which overwhelmingly reject the federal government’s decisions, have been consistently drowned out and ignored,” Nagruk Harcharek, president of the Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, said in a statement on the bill’s passage.

“We are grateful to Congress for exercising its legislative authority to correct the federal government’s hypocrisy and advance Iñupiat self-determination in our ancestral homelands,” Harcharek continued.