What will “energy dominance” mean for Alaska’s North Slope?
The Trump administration could radically transform one of the last truly wild landscapes in North America
A herd of caribou at the edge of Teshekpuk Lake Special Area. The 3-million-acre zone includes the largest lake in Arctic Alaska. Photo by Nathaniel Wilder https://nathanielwilder.com/
I have a new story in Sierra Magazine on the future of oil and gas development on Alaska’s North Slope, which looks very different now than it did a month ago. With Trump returning to office, Alaska will once again occupy a central place in the administration’s pursuit of “energy dominance,” as much an ideological framework as it is a set of policies. During Trump’s first term, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain was opened to oil and gas leasing—through the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—and the Interior department, under David Bernhardt, pushed to dramatically expand development in the National Petroleum Reserve (NPR-A) to the west. At the same time, ConocoPhillips’s Willow project, which is entirely within the NPR-A, was fast-tracked (despite a good deal of local opposition) and a 2019 lease sale in the reserve allowed for the acquisition of millions of acres of new holdings for a handful of companies. Just before leaving office, on January 6, 2021, the same day rioters stormed the Capitol, the Interior department held the first ever lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Industry was bullish. Conoco was trumpeting a “North Slope renaissance.”
But under Biden things began to change. The refuge leases were suspended and eventually canceled, which has been the source of an ongoing lawsuit brought by the state of Alaska. Meanwhile, the administration didn’t bother to hold a single lease sale in the NPR-A and, last year, introduced a rule that would protect large portions of the reserve (about 13 million acres). In response, three companies took the unusual step of requesting temporary one-year suspensions of their holdings in the reserve, pending the fate of the new rule and, perhaps more important, the outcome of the election.
In terms of the future of oil and gas development on the North Slope, though, the most consequential decision made by Biden was the approval of the Willow project. The original version of the ConocoPhillips project, approved during the final months of Trump’s first term, was overturned in a lawsuit. But in what appeared to be a concession to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a powerful member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and a key “swing” vote on the Inflation Reduction Act and Build Back Better, the Biden administration defended Willow from day one. An eleventh-hour campaign pressuring Biden to reject the project generated a great deal of enthusiasm—and, reportedly, over a million letters sent to the White House—but ultimately fell short. In March 2023, one day after Interior put out a press release extolling the president’s conservation legacy, Biden signed off on a slightly scaled back version of the project—one that has proven much harder to challenge in court.
As I explain in the story, Willow matters not just because it will emit more than 250 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the course of the next 30 years, but it will also make it much easier for companies to expand westward in the NPR-A, an area the size of Indiana that, despite its name, has seen very little oil and gas development since it was established over 100 years ago. Conoco has the capital to invest in new roads, pipelines, and a second central processing facility that other companies can piggy-back on when they develop their own lease holdings. For this reason, the company has referred to Willow as the “next great Alaska hub.” (The first would be Prudhoe Bay, where oil was discovered in 1968, spurring the construction of the 800-mile Trans Alaska Pipeline and the Dalton Highway.)
And that’s where we stand today. The Biden-era rule prohibiting new leasing in parts of the reserve and strengthening protections in so-called special conservation areas (such as Teshekpuk Lake, pictured above) will almost certainly be reversed. New leasing, exploration, and drilling will proceed at a frantic pace. And efforts to develop the wildlife refuge’s coastal plain—a landscape that has occupied enormous significance for the environmental movement for over four decades—will move forward.
This all comes as the Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet and the state—Alaska and the federal government—appear woefully unprepared to address the coming upheaval (temperatures in Deadhorse, the unincorporated community next to Prudhoe Bay, reached a shocking 89 degrees this August). As a study published last week made clear, the impacts to communities and infrastructure on the North Slope will be profound. According to the authors, by the end of the century, under medium and high emissions scenarios, “erosion and inundation” due to thawing permafrost and rising sea levels will transform coastal villages and pose new and unpredictable threats to the dense network of existing pipelines and well pads in the Arctic.
But industry hasn’t shown much interest in the long view. As the Arctic melts, Hilcorp, which bought out BP’s Alaska assets in 2019 and whose CEO, Jeffery Hildebrand, is a major Trump donor, is looking to use natural gas from its Prudhoe Bay oilfields to power data centers for—you guessed it—mining Bitcoin (Hilcorp also has a terrible environmental record in Alaska and globally but that is a subject for another time). Rather than invest in the technologies and adaptive measures that will allow North Slope communities to continue living in this fast-changing region (or simply providing them with electricity), Hilcorp is banking on the future of crypto. A break from the past? Perhaps. But one that is firmly rooted in the long history of extraction.
Trump is somewhat obsessed with Arctic riches—recall his proposal to buy Greenland in 2019—and during the campaign frequently referenced the wildlife refuge, falsely claiming that its oil and gas reserves were comparable to Saudi Arabia’s. There’s little doubt that the incoming administration will do everything in its power to turn the entire coastal plain into what Trump has called a giant oil farm. For those who want to see this landscape protected, the next four years will be an uphill battle.
As I conclude in the story:
During Trump’s first term, environmentalists’ efforts to stymie development were largely successful in part because the Trump administration was careless and sloppy in its policymaking. “He didn’t get a lot accomplished in our world, at the end of the day, in his first term,” Miller [executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League] said. “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that’s the case again.”
Whether those defensive measures will be as effective a second time around is unclear, as the Trump operation appears to be better organized now. At the very least, this much is apparent: During a moment of great ecological destabilization, Trump 2.0 could radically reshape one of the last truly wild landscapes in North America.