President-elect Donald Trump will get another try to unleash drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge during his second term, but oil production won’t come easy.
The success of a potential drilling campaign may depend on whether North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) — Trump’s pick for Interior secretary — prioritizes Alaska oil and gas issues and whether his staff members are skilled at unraveling Biden administration rules crafted to hamper drilling in the Arctic.
ANWR, treasured for its wildness, is already facing the dramatic effects of a changing climate, including thawing permafrost —an underground layer of ice, dirt and organic matter that stays frozen all year. Alaska’s remote location also makes oil drilling more expensive and risky for companies, particularly in the sensitive wildlife habitat of the refuge. Still, the potential payoff remains enticing to drilling supporters.
“There are billions and billions of barrels of oil recoverable in ANWR. The main problem is the permitting and litigation risk,” said Randy Ruaro, executive director of the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, an independent economic development agency set up by the state’s government. “You just have to get the system in place that allows for reasonable permitting and production of the oil and gas.”
Trump has frequently called opening ANWR to drilling during his first administration one of his best achievements in office. The refuge’s oil program was included as a rider to a 2017 tax overhaul from a Republican-led Congress. But an auction for drilling rights just before Trump left office was a bust.
The Biden administration reversed course, freezing exploration for oil in ANWR, but President Joe Biden didn’t galvanize Congress to undo the program created in 2017. In fact, the Biden administration is now planning to hold an oil sale, the second mandated by the tax law, before Trump takes office Jan. 20.
Opponents of drilling in the refuge say they are gearing up for a fight to stave off ANWR development while Trump is in office.
“This is what we’ve been doing for a long time,” said Pat Lavin, Alaska policy adviser for the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife. “We’re gonna fiercely oppose any foray into the Arctic refuge. … It’s one of our most iconic landscapes.”
Nagruk Harcharek, president of Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat — a coalition of Alaska Native organizations and leaders in Alaska’s North Slope borough that supports drilling in the refuge — said he was looking forward to a change in the White House if it means the group’s interests were better represented than during the Biden administration.
He said Alaska oil and gas has a “pretty good track record” of developing with environmental protections in place.
“It’s good for us to have the development, it’s good for the communities to have the development, and we want to maintain that balance,” he said.
The Interior Department declined to comment for this story. The department has previously said that it has held several meetings on the North Slope and sent senior officials to Alaska to hear community input on the refuge plan, when criticized by Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat.
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
Unraveling Biden’s rules
Several Republican insiders said ANWR drilling could get a boost within hours of Trump taking office Jan. 20 with a suite of executive actions currently being inked by his transition team.
Those Trump demands will likely reverse several executive actions signed by Biden when he took office in 2021.
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) has listed more than 60 decisions during the Biden administration that he says negatively affected Alaska, including a Day 1 suspension of oil activity in the refuge.
A former Interior Department official familiar with the Trump transition said Sullivan’s list will likely be used as a blueprint for what to undo in Alaska.
“It’s safe to assume all of those will be repealed Day 1,” the person said.
Sullivan’s office did not provide comment for this story.
But some of the Biden-era rules will be challenging to undo, or at least time-consuming.
The incoming Republican-controlled Congress could try to invalidate an environmental impact statement for ANWR written by the Biden administration using the Congressional Review Act, according to the former Interior official.
If successful, that would likely revert the ANWR oil program to an earlier environmental review completed during the Trump era. And it would eliminate the list of stipulations and objectives that the Biden administration has put in place, such as limiting leasing to 400,000 acres of ANWR, the minimum area called for under the Republicans’ 2017 tax law.
Some Alaska Natives, like the Gwich’in people who depend on caribou that calve in the refuge’s coastal plain, are fierce critics of drilling in the region. They have urged for stronger protections than either the Trump or Biden administrations offered.
Galen Gilbert, first chief of the Arctic Village Council, said in a statement last month that the Trump administration’s assessment of oil and gas in the refuge “completely disregarded the impact any oil and gas activities would have on our Tribal communities who rely on that land.”
Gilbert said the Biden administration’s did additional environmental work to improve on that record, but it still fell short of protecting Alaska Natives’ “right to continue our traditional way of life that depends on this sacred place.”
A decades-old public land order called PLO 5150 is also a serious issue Trump will be asked to address in Alaska.
The order limits the use of federal land along the 800 miles of pipeline connecting the North Slope oil fields to central Alaska. But Alaska wants that order lifted so the land can be transferred to state ownership to allow for other uses like mining.
Alaska ownership is also seen as a safeguard against a push from environmental groups for the federal government to yank rights of way for the pipeline due to its contribution to the oil industry and by extension climate change.
The Biden administration had promised Alaska leaders it would consider revoking the public land order, but it reversed course.
Alaskans also want Trump to unravel a rule finalized by the Biden administration that makes drilling more difficult in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an even larger swath of public land than ANWR located on the western edge of the North Slope.
The administration may be able to change the rule via a court settlement with Alaska and industry, who’ve sued to stop the rule, according to the former Trump official.
Personnel and policy
One of the most critical questions for whether the Trump administration can advance drilling in the refuge is who the president-elect picks for key leadership positions at Interior.
During the first Trump administration, key positions were held by Alaskans. That included placing Joe Balash, a former acting Alaska commissioner of Natural Resources, as the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for land and minerals management, and Tara Sweeney, an Alaska Native, for assistant secretary of the Interior for Indian affairs.
Balash has been credited with helping pass major regulatory changes during the Trump administration to benefit Arctic oil, gas and mining on public lands, including finalizing the drilling program in ANWR.
The former Interior official who spoke to POLITICO’s E&E News on the condition of anonymity said the Alaska-heavy Interior Department during the first Trump term was a “dream team” for achieving Alaskan priorities.
It’s not clear yet if the state will be as well represented again.
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, was reportedly on a short list for Trump’s new Interior secretary. Trump’s pick of Burgum, a former software executive from North Dakota, is a signal that Alaska may not have the same level of priority for the White House as it did in Trump’s first term.
But proponents of drilling on the North Slope are increasingly asking for more durable policies than executive orders and regulations — actions from the White House — to avoid the political whiplash every time the White House changes hands, some Alaskans said.
That means congressional allies will also be key to changing the direction of ANWR.
“The new president has a list of things Alaskans have wanted, some of which are from a long time ago,” said a former Alaska politician and Alaska Republican insider who spoke with E&E News.
The person was granted anonymity to speak freely about the Trump administration’s transition.
“What is more likely to happen is we’re going to be working with his Interior Department and our Congress to figure out, how do we make this not a tennis match that changes every single time an administration changes?” the person said.
Sullivan and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have been united in supporting ANWR for decades — Murkowski wrote the 2017 tax law rider that created the refuge’s oil and gas program and mandated at least two sales.
Murkowski has been critical of Trump and suggested he is unfit for president. She was one of seven Republican senators who voted in 2021 to convict him on an impeachment charge for fomenting the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
But the senator has vowed to work with the president despite their prior disagreements.
“At the end of the day, regardless of how a given president feels about me personally or politically, my job, my role is to make sure that Alaska stands to gain, and that’s what I intend to do,” Murkowski said last month, according to the Anchorage Daily News.
“I have been able to work with every single president, Republican and Democrat, to advance things that work in Alaska’s best interest. That’s part of my job,” she said at a roundtable with local journalists. “You figure out areas that you can work together in. You figure out those areas where you need to push back in.”
Murkowski’s office did not provide a comment for this story.
One former Trump official, who worked on public land energy issues, said Murkowski may need to take a less prominent role in some Alaska matters to avoid friction with Trump. The person was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the Trump transition.
The Alaska Republican insider said Murkowski remains powerful in Congress and it would benefit the administration to work with her.
“Practically, she’s the No. 2 Republican in rank on the Appropriations Committee. Do you think every federal agency head wants to go toe-to-toe with her?” the person said, adding that “I think she’s going to make an honest try. And I hope the president makes an honest try.”
Remote oil field
Regardless of the political interest in development in ANWR, which is long-standing for Alaska leaders and many North Slope Alaska Natives, the oil and gas industry will ultimately be the test of Trump’s ANWR policies.
The North Slope is far from Asian and Lower 48 markets to sell its oil and gas. The refuge also has no current infrastructure like pipelines to move oil and gas. Major oil companies, like BP and Shell, have exited Alaska and reduced the number of well-funded major companies likely to bid in federal lease sales.
Meanwhile, some major insurers and banks have increasingly expressed reservations about supporting drilling and mining in the Arctic because of its cultural and biological sensitivity and vulnerability to climate change. The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the globe, according to NOAA.
The only certain bidder appears to be the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, which in October approved a plan to use up to $20 million to bid in the upcoming ANWR auction. The authority was the majority bidder in the Trump-era sale in 2021.
Lavin said the difficult oil market is one of the strongest protections against the Trump administration’s increasing drilling access.
“The headwinds are substantial, even if drilling the Arctic refuge is what you want to do,” he said.
The former Trump Interior official who spoke to E&E News said geological data — obtained through seismic surveys to show what’s beneath the refuge’s surface — could galvanize industry interest.
Seismic technology uses sound echoes to digitally create a 3D rendering of the subsurface, helping companies identify where oil and gas deposits are located and strategize how to tap them. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates as much as 10 billion barrels of oil under the refuge’s surface. But that estimate hasn’t been fortified with modern testing techniques.
The last attempt at shooting seismic in the refuge came from an Alaska Native organization — the Kaktovik Iñupiat Corp. (KIC) — in 2021. KIC is one of the only entities to ever have drilled a well in the refuge. KIC, with partners BP, Chevron and Arctic Slope Regional, drilled a test well in ANWR in 1985. But data from the well has not been made public.
The Biden administration voided KIC’s application to shoot seismic in 2021 for failing to complete required overhead surveys to look for polar bears.
KIC disputed Interior’s arguments, saying the Biden administration intentionally stalled the application. KIC and the Alaska Oil and Gas Association did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Seismic testing would be limited to leased acres in the refuge, under the Biden administration’s final supplemental environmental review for the ANWR oil program. Trump is expected to lift that restriction, but Interior officials could still face hurdles.
Seismic testing uses heavy trucks that can crush polar bear dens, a protected species. The bears are classified as threatened by the Fish and Wildlife Service, and a subpopulation of polar bear females often spend winter in snow dens with their cubs in the refuge’s coastal plain. They are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
The winter months are also when oil and gas activity is allowed in the Arctic because the tundra is frozen and less vulnerable to traffic damage. The timing makes a seismic program challenging.
Even if the Trump administration is supportive of seismic, it will be difficult for federal agencies in Alaska to approve a seismic program because of the high risk to bears, said Lavin with Defenders of Wildlife.
From seismic impacts to climate, an oil program doesn’t fit in the refuge, he said.
“It just kind of sticks out like a sore thumb as a really bad idea,” Lavin said.
