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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Environmental groups are taking issue with a recent report from the Bush administration that says much of the oil and natural gas beneath federal lands in Alaska is off-limits to development.

The Bureau of Land Management released an inventory of public lands last week that shows 279 million acres of untapped resources across the country. Those areas contain an estimated 31 billion barrels of oil and 231 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

The report says 60 percent of federal lands that have oil and gas potential are closed to leasing, mostly as a result of congressional or administrative mandates. The report does not include state or private lands.

In Alaska, the agency inventory totaled 40.3 million acres of federal land with potential for an estimated 17.4 billion barrels of oil and 80.8 trillion cubic feet of gas. The report claims 32.4 million of those acres are off-limits.

Critics of the agency accuse it of oversimplifying the amount of land that is available for development.

“The report tries to paint the picture that the oil industry is limited as to where it can drill, but it’s just not the case,” said Eleanor Huffines, Alaska regional director for The Wilderness Society.

The inventory included the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, parts of the Gates of the Arctic National Park, the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, the White Mountain National Recreation Area, Steese National Conservation Area and parts of the Alaska Peninsula.

The largest concentration of untapped onshore oil resources is on the North Slope, some 13.3 billion barrels of oil and 52.4 trillion cubic feet of gas. But the report claims 70 percent of federal land in northern Alaska is not accessible to developers.

Huffines says that figure is inaccurate.

The Wilderness Society’s analysis shows the report categorizes as inaccessible lands that the BLM knows are available for leasing, including areas undergoing resource management planning or areas that can be reached through directional drilling.

Some 89 million acres in Alaska, both onshore and offshore state and federal lands, are available for oil and gas development, Huffines said. Nearly 12 million acres are under lease.

“They are manipulating these figures, and it’s very misleading to the public, which is not useful in moving forward in a productive dialog,” she said.

For example, the inventory lists all of the 4.6 million-acre northeast planning area of NPR-A as off-limits. However, BLM has already sold two oil and gas leases in the northeast planning area and a third is expected in October, Huffines said.

“Four million acres is currently open to leasing and when the new plan is finalized in July, 4.4 million of the 4.6 million acres will be opened,” she said.

BLM officials in Anchorage said 800,000 acres are under lease, and another 3.2 million acres are being considered for leasing. Earlier this month, the agency said it would defer leasing of 430,000 acres around the environmentally sensitive Teshekpuk Lake for 10 years.

Huffines said the agency also lists the entire 8.8 million acres of the northwest planning area of NPR-A as having impediments to development. However, she said, 7.3 million acres are available for leasing, of which 2.3 million acres are already under lease.

Huffines said the environmental group is not opposed to all development, but the pace at which the Bush administration has been approving drilling permits — more than 7,000 nationwide in 2007 alone — has prompted concern.

“We are supportive of some oil and gas development in NPR-A, we just want to make sure we protect the most sensitive biological and cultural resources in the region,” she said. “Our goal is for the government to come up with a more balanced plan for the Arctic.”

Pam Miller, with the Northern Alaska Environmental Center in Fairbanks, takes exception to BLM’s inclusion in the report of areas Congress set aside for conservation, including the Interior's Yukon Flats.

"They are trying to undermine the protection that Congress granted by including these areas in the report," she said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Doyon, Limited are considering a land swap that could open 110,000 acres of federally protected land in the Yukon Flats to drilling.

BLM estimates the Yukon Flats holds unproven resources of 149 million barrels of oil and 2.7 billion cubic feet of gas, but that 99 percent of the region remains off limits.

The amount of oil and gas that the Yukon Flats could potentially supply would be miniscule compared to the damage that development is likely to do to the environment, Miller said.

“The whole premise of the report is just flat out wrong, how they characterized it,” Miller said. “It’s fraught with exaggerating the amount of potential for development throughout Alaska.”

Record high gasoline prices have spurred a resurgence of efforts to open up more federal land to oil and gas development. Alaska’s congressional delegation has been pushing to allow drilling in the coastal plain of ANWR, although Democrats, who control both chambers of Congress, have signaled the proposal is dead in the water.

Opponents of opening more areas to drilling insist the industry already has a large amount of federal land under lease that it’s not developing.

Energy companies hold leases on roughly 44 million acres of federal land nationwide, and they produced oil and gas from 11.6 million of those leased acres in 2007.

The BLM report is the third in a series of scientific studies requested by Congress on oil and gas potential in federal lands and limitations on their development.