The U.S. Interior Department said the Biden administration will offer oil and gas drilling leases in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge at a sale on January 9 .
The agency will make 400,000 acres available to drillers at the auction, the minimum required by a 2017 law that mandated the sale.
ANWR is a 19-million-acre refuge for species including polar bears and Porcupine caribou.
The wild landscape lacks roads and public facilities, but its 1.6-million-acre coastal area along the Beaufort Sea is estimated to have up to 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
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