UPDATE 1-U.S. vows first oil lease sale in Alaska arctic refuge this year

The U.S. Interior Department is determined to sell oil leases for the first time this year in the ecologically sensitive but presumably petroleum-rich coastal plain of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a Trump administration official said on Thursday. “That lease sale will happen in 2019,” Joe Balash, the assistant Interior secretary for lands and minerals management, told an oil industry conference in Anchorage.

The decision marks a likely turning point in a decades-long battle between environmental groups and fossil energy companies over the Beaufort Sea coast of the wildlife refuge, home to caribou, polar bear and other arctic wildlife east of Alaska's North Slope oil fields. The refuge had been off-limits to oil and gas drilling until the end of 2017, when Congress passed a tax overhaul that included a mandate for oil leasing there.

The tax bill requires the Interior Department to hold a lease sale within four years, offering at least 400,000 acres to development within the coastal plain of ANWR, America's largest wildlife sanctuary. (Reporting by Yereth Rosen in Anchorage, Alaska; Editing by Steve Gorman, Sandra Maler and Lisa Shumaker)