Industry News
On October 23, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced that the Trump Administration would be opening 1.5 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas drilling. This announcement continues a slew of executive orders and Federal rule changes expanding and accelerating resource extraction on public lands. The Big Beautiful Bill, passed in July 2025, mandates at least five oil and gas drilling lease sales in the Arctic over the next 10 years.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, located in Northeast Alaska, covers almost 20 million acres of forest, tundra, and coastline, and is home to polar bears, caribou, sheep, muskox, and wolves. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has no roads, trails, or facilities, making it some of the least disturbed, most remote public land in the nation. A large swathe of the refuge is made up by the Mollie Beattie Wilderness Area, a designation that comes with the strictest protections, but the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which established the refuge in 1980, left open the possibility of oil and gas drilling on a 1.5 million-acre section located on the North coast, referred to as the 1002 area.
Despite proclamations from the Federal government that Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are “open for business,” there may not be much corporate enthusiasm for pursuing new drilling projects. The 2017 Tax Bill also mandated lease sales in the refuge, but the first sale in 2021 attracted no interest from major oil companies. The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state-owned corporation, purchased nine leases for $12 million, but has never had the funds to develop a drilling project. The Biden Administration later cancelled those leases, citing environmental review that did not properly address climate change. In 2024, the Biden Administration held the second of the two required sales, but did not receive a single bid. Critics have suggested that the terms of the leases the Biden Administration offered were too restrictive to warrant serious consideration.
The remoteness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge may be contributing to hesitation from oil companies in pursuing exploration and drilling projects. With no existing roads in the refuge and no ports along the shore, it is not clear how oil would be transported from drilling sites to refineries. Further, Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs all announced in March 2020 that they would not invest in drilling projects in the refuge. A lack of seed capital effectively shuts down any potential drilling projects for all but the largest oil companies.
Beyond infrastructure or investment challenges, no one knows how much oil is actually in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated the amount of oil in the refuge in 1987 and 1998. The 1998 study found that there could be around 7 billion barrels of recoverable oil, located mostly in the Northwestern part of the 1.5 million-acre zone known as the 1002 area. Since then, estimates for the amount of oil in the neighboring National Petroleum Reserve Alaska have been significantly reduced, as geological survey methods have improved and several sites were found to contain natural gas instead of crude oil. 20 billion barrels of oil may sound like a lot, but the U.S. uses an estimated 7 billion barrels of oil per year. The Prudhoe Bay Oil Field, located West of the refuge, contains more than 25 billion barrels, and the Texas Oil Fields contain 20 billion barrels.
In 1985, Chevron drilled a test well on private land bordering the refuge, but capped the well, removed all the drilling equipment, and has never publicly shared the results from the test well. Chevron did not participate in either the 2021 or the 2024 lease sales and paid to get out of existing drilling leases it held on private land bordering the refuge. No other major oil companies have seriously pursued drilling projects in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge either because of environmental concerns or lack of proven oil deposits.
Though the Trump Administration continues removing hurdles to resource extraction on public lands, there may not be much interest in drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. With no date yet for the first lease sale in the refuge, details about how restrictive or widespread drilling projects could be are not yet available. The creation of many of the National Parks and Wilderness Areas in Alaska came alongside the expectation that new drilling and mining projects would continue. Constantly shifting political priorities and a building reliance on executive power have led to an uncertain future for much of Alaska’s public lands. For now, a mix of industry hesitation, logistical hurdles, and public resistance may keep Alaska’s far north untouched.
