After Trump win, major Alaska oil and mining projects should be back on the table

Alaska’s elected leaders are hopeful that major drilling, road and mining projects in the state will pick up momentum again under a second term with Donald Trump as president.

The Republican president-elect this week said in a video message that he will continue to “fight for Alaska like never before” to develop the state’s natural resources.

In its first term, the Trump administration worked to advance potentially big projects and open up land to future development in Alaska. The projects included oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, opening logging potential in the Tongass National Forest, and permitting the 200-mile Ambler road through the Northwest Alaska wilderness for mining.

But Biden, a Democrat, stopped or delayed those efforts and others.

Alaska leaders say they expect to see new traction on major resource-extraction projects and others issues in the state.

How much Trump, known for making bold, unfilled promises, can accomplish in Alaska is unknown. Many of his past actions in the state were hampered by lawsuits. But observers say his past efforts on resource-extraction in the state indicate he’ll move aggressively.

“I can tell you a lot’s going to happen for Alaska,” said Gov. Mike Dunleavy in an address on social media Wednesday. “I would anticipate very quickly a lot of opportunity being restored to Alaskans.”

“(Trump) sees Alaska’s oil resources, our gas resources, our mining resources, our timber resources, our location on the globe, our military, as assets not just for Alaska, but as solutions to the country’s problems,” Dunleavy said.

Environmental groups, concerned about impacts to the climate and wildlife, have vowed to fight the projects once again.

They also say renewable energy plans could be slowed or stopped if Trump pulls unspent funding from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, an action he’s vowed to take.

“It’s going to be open season on Alaska’s resources, and whatever environmental damage comes from that, I don’t think his administration is gonna lose sleep over,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

A ‘maximal approach’?

This week, Trump said in the video message — which was posted on social media by Dunleavy — that he’ll fight “like never before” to develop the state’s natural resources. Trump, who signed the 2017 law to allow drilling in the Arctic refuge after decades of controversy over it, also said he’ll increase military investment in Alaska amid “menacing” actions by Russia and China off Alaska’s coasts.

[President-elect Trump vows to ‘fight for Alaska like never before’ in video message shared by Dunleavy]

Trump also listed mining, and the state’s long-proposed 800-mile gas pipeline, required to develop stranded North Slope gas, as specific areas that he pledged will see progress under his administration.

The Project 2025 transition document, created by the conservative Heritage Foundation as a roadmap for a Trump White House, provides other potential goals for the president-elect to pursue in Alaska.

They include once again expanding oil leasing opportunities in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, re-permitting the Ambler road, and expanding drilling opportunities in the scaled-back version of the ConocoPhillips’ Willow project approved last year by the Biden administration, among other items.

Trump has disavowed the document, but former officials in his administration helped write it.

William Perry Pendley, former acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, wrote a special section calling for “immediate actions” in Alaska. Pendley did not return a phone call seeking comment.

The next Trump administration will need to follow permitting procedures, and getting Alaska projects underway again could take years, conservation groups and others say.

If the administration expedites those steps, there’s more potential for the legal flaws and lawsuits that halted or delayed his first-term efforts in Alaska, they say.

“If past is prologue, a lot of their attempts will be so extreme they will violate the law,” said Erik Grafe, deputy managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Alaska office. “I think a maximal approach is not just bad policy but is likely to run afoul of the law.”

Alaska Republican U.S. Sens. Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski have both said they’ll work with Trump to benefit Alaska.

Murkowski, who has a fraught relationship with Trump, said she anticipates “a return to greater economic opportunities through resource development (under his presidency).”

[Murkowski, a vocal Trump critic, vows to work with him to advance Alaska interests]

Murkowski said she believes that Trump’s past support for Alaska projects helped him win in the state.

Alaskans who “might not have been head over heels for Donald Trump” nonetheless supported him because of his policies that benefit the state’s resource-based economy, she said.

Sullivan said he viewed the Biden administration as working with conservation groups to shut down resource development projects in Alaska.

That increases uncertainty, hurting investment in Alaska, he said.

“These are huge projects, and people who are literally being whipsawed can lose patience,” he said.

But Alaska now has an opportunity under Trump for new momentum for a variety of projects, including the gas pipeline, he said.

“We’ll have a very different approach on helping Alaska’s economy, helping our workers, helping jobs and opportunity here,” he said.

Future ANWR battles

During his campaign, Trump promised to “Drill, baby, drill” on Day 1 in office. He said he’d restart drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced it would hold a second, legally required lease sale in the coastal plain of the Arctic refuge. But the administration appears poised to select a plan that would offer the minimum amount of land for lease.

The amount, at 400,000 acres, is less than half the acreage offered for sale during the first lease sale under Trump in 2021. The lease sale failed spectacularly after it generated little income and no bidding from major oil companies.

But Alaska politicians say they think opposition from the incoming Biden administration was one reason it fizzled. That hurdle no longer exists.

Trump could expand leasing opportunities in the refuge, said Hartl with the Center for Biological Diversity. If Republicans control both chambers of Congress as many expect, they could require several additional lease sales there, he said.

“They could mandate 10 if they wanted,” he said.

The Gwich’in Steering Committee, which opposes drilling in the refuge, said on social media after the election that it will continue to fight to protect the Porcupine caribou herd that they hunt, and that calves in the coastal plain and nearby areas.

“Our people have resided in the Arctic Lands for generations, and we will continue thriving, mindful of our responsibility to honor our ancestors’ legacy and for the future of our Children’s Traditions rights!” the group’s co-chairs, Kelly Fields and Second Chief Harold Frost Jr., said in a statement on social media.

Elisabeth Dabney, executive director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, said conservation groups helped stop Trump’s Alaska efforts during his first term in part with legal action.

She said groups like hers will have their work cut out for them with a second Trump term, but they won’t back down. There are concerns that Trump, who has vowed to fire large swaths of the federal workforce, will attempt to erode protections for the land in part by bullying career staff who know Alaska’s unique laws and cultures, she said.

But groups like hers can turn to decades of precedent and laws like the National Environmental Policy and Clean Water acts, she said.

“We’re not going to play into this fear of Trump,” she said. “I think there’s some bedrock laws that are on our side and those will definitely have to be defended.”

“But as Alaskans, we’re not going to be made to fear,” she said. “This is our life. These are our life ways. This is our culture. And there’s just no other option except to maintain the willpower and keep going, and make sure he doesn’t open new areas or expand existing development that isn’t to the benefit of Alaska.”

What happens to Inflation Reduction Act funding?

Trump has said he would pull unspent funding from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate law.

Phil Wight, an assistant professor of history and Arctic and northern studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said some measures of the law would likely be retained, since many of the investments and other benefits are helping conservative states.

If Trump does pull funding from the act, it could delay large-scale renewable projects, he said. Those include solar or wind farms that Alaska needs to combat a shortage of natural gas from Cook Inlet.

“I think it will slow it down and make the economics less attractive, but it will not stop them,” he said.

Murkowski, who voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, said she’ll look critically at any effort to undo it.

She said tax benefits supporting green energy technology, chip manufacturing and other projects are creating jobs and helping rejuvenate communities nationally.

“And people are saying, ‘Well, not sure that I liked what got us here, but I like what’s happening now, and so don’t get rid of this,’ ” she said.

She said it’s not unusual for a new administration to threaten to undo the efforts of the previous administration, when political parties change.

But it’s important to be discerning, and not just take the “approach that everything that a Democrat administration did is bad and we have to get rid of it,” she said.

“That’s a recipe for economic disaster because of the uncertainty that you inject in the business climate then,” she said. “So hopefully there is a level of honest appraisal of what we’re dealing with and some of the legislation that has been passed and a look to critically evaluate it. We’ll make some determinations and if it needs to be adjusted, you adjust it.”

Daily News reporters Sean Maguire and Iris Samuels contributed.