Singleton's September ruling blocked BLM plans to sell oil and gas leases in the Teskekpuk wetlands last fall.

The Teskekpuk Lake area is a vital habitat for migrating birds, caribou and other Arctic wildlife, and also critical to the region's Inupiat Eskimos, who depend on wild food for much of their diet.

The earliest that any lease sale could result from the new plan would likely be October or November of 2008, said Sharon Wilson, a spokeswoman for the BLM's Alaska office.

After any lease sale, it would take at least several months before any exploration could take place, she said.

The new BLM plan -- drafted with new environmental analysis to comply with the court ruling -- offers varying options for oil development in the 600,000 acres of protected wetlands north and east of the lake, which is the largest freshwater body on Alaska's North Slope.

Unlike the previous BLM plan, which called for an aggressive oil development scenario, the new document does not recommend any particular course of action. It includes varying leasing proposals among alternatives that the agency said should be weighed by the public, including the option of no new development.

The BLM's new plan includes recent studies about the impacts of global warming and the potential of Endangered Species Act protections for polar bears, the agency said.

The final plan will recommend one of the four alternatives, or perhaps a combination of them, Wilson said.

The area also holds high potential for new oil discoveries. Development scenarios proposed in the new plan would give access to up to 4 billion barrels of oil, according to BLM estimates.

Since the Bush administration first proposed development in the Teskekpuk Lake wetlands in 2005, the area's fate has become the subject of a national debate pitting the interests of domestic energy production against those of environmental conservation.

The area is within the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an Indiana-sized federal land unit west of Prudhoe Bay and other established North Slope oil fields. There has not been any commercial oil development there, though it was established in 1923 for its energy-providing potential.

Commercial development may be on the horizon. Companies have recently leased and explored tracts in the far northeastern section of the reserve. ConocoPhillips and Anadarko plan to develop satellite oil fields to feed into facilities at the Alpine field, located on state land just east of the reserve.