Day: March 20, 2026

Representatives of major oil field operators on Alaska’s North Slope said Thursday they are bullish on the region’s future as a major producer for decades to come. Their optimism was reinforced in part by a record-breaking oil and gas lease sale held this week by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

For ConocoPhillips, Alaska’s largest oil producer, the most prominent source of future development is the company’s massive Willow project, said Marc Lemons, the company’s Alaska vice president of development and execution.

“Willow is a once-in-a-generation project,” Lemons said in a presentation at Meet Alaska, an Anchorage conference held annually by the Alaska Support Industry Alliance, a trade organization.

Willow, a project in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska on the western side of the North Slope, is set to tap into reserves estimated about 600 million barrels, with production peaking at 180,000 barrels a day, according to company estimates.

Lemons said the company is devoting $8.5 billion to $9 billion to Willow development. The project is about halfway to completion and on track to start producing oil in early 2029, he said.

Meanwhile, Lemons said, smaller projects will also boost North Slope output.

ConocoPhillips’ Nuna field started producing in 2024, with output that is now about 10,000 barrels a day but is expected to be double that in the future, he said. Next up for ConocoPhillips is boosted production at the neighboring Coyote field, where peak production is expected to be 13,000 barrels a day, he said. Another development, Narwal, is located near the large Alpine field, and ConocoPhillips continues to invest in its longstanding program to produce oil from West Sak, a reservoir within the Kuparuk region.

A busy exploration season is also underway to find the next generational project, he said.

“We have one of the largest exploration seasons planned in many years,” he said. It includes seismic surveys and drilling within the National Petroleum Reserve.

ConocoPhillips was one of the major participants in the just-completed federal lease sale held in the National Petroleum Reserve. The sale drew a record $163 million in high bids, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced on Wednesday.

Lemons said continued exploration in the petroleum reserve is a high priority for ConocoPhillips.

“Exploration is a 10- to 20-year play, and it is high risk,” he said. “But it’s necessary for the long-term stability of the North Slope.”

For Santos, an Australian company, the next expected milestone will be the startup this year of production at the huge Pikka field.

Pete Laliberte, Santos’ vice president of business development, said the first phase of Pikka’s development will tap into reserves of about 400 million barrels, with production peaking at 80,000 barrels per day.

Future phases of Pikka development are expected to tap into an even bigger resource, he said. “We’re just getting started” he said.

Laliberte said optimism about future North Slope oil prospects is seen in other companies’ actions.

The geologic feature called the Brookian Sequence, which includes the oil-bearing Nanushuk Formation, has been “driving the overall, like, renaissance on the Slope,” he said. Santos and other companies have shown they can be successful at drilling there, and the wider industry has taken notice, as demonstrated in the record National Petroleum Reserve lease sale.

“Right now, all of a sudden you’ve got a lot of international companies, and the big ones, taking notice of this and taking notice of the, and taking notice of the Brookian plays,” he said.

The Spanish company Repsol, which is Santos’ partner in Pikka, was one of the major bidders in the lease sale. In partnership with a Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary, Repsol bid about $90 million in the sale, according to preliminary results.

For Hilcorp, the privately held independent energy company that since 2020 has been the operator of the Prudhoe Bay field, the concept of development expansion is different.

As company vice president Denali Kemppel described it to the Alliance audience, Hilcorp’s longstanding business strategy has focused on revival of old legacy fields that larger companies sell off.

That has been the case on the North Slope, where Hilcorp began acquiring assets and operator positions from BP since 2014. When BP departed the state in 2020, it sold all of its remaining Alaska assets to Hilcorp, including its share of Prudhoe and the Trans Alaska Pipeline System.

Although its assets are old, Hilcorp is in the midst of a renewal program that is boosting their output, Kemppel said.

Part of that program is a project reinvigorating the Prudhoe Bay field. Called Project Taiga, it is a collaboration between Hilcorp and the other Prudhoe partners, ConocoPhillips and

“It involves building new roads, building new pads, infrastructure,” she said. “And so when we think about Project Taiga, what we think about is potentially 150 to 200 new drill wells. We think about, potentially a billion barrels of oil.” She said that new oil will be potentially starting to flow in 2028.

Hilcorp has also demonstrated success at Milne Point, a BP-developed field that the smaller company began operating in 2014, Kemppel said.

Since Hilcorp took over, Milne Point’s production has tripled from 2014 levels, she said. “We think this is just a real success story for the North Slope,” she said.

The oil revenue and production forecast crafted by state officials reflects the companies’ optimism.

A revised forecast issued earlier this month by the Alaska Department of Revenue anticipates a significant increase in North Slope oil production in the coming year. Production that is expected to average 457,000 barrels per day for the 12 months ending on June 30 is expected to increase to an average 517,800 barrels per day for the coming fiscal year, largely because of Pikka’s startup, according to the forecast.

North Slope production is expected to rise to an average 678,800 barrels per day by fiscal year 2034, thanks in large part to both Pikka and Willow, according to the new forecast.

While expected 2034 production is much lower than the 2 million barrel-per-day peak achieved on the North Slope in 1988, it is higher than production in all the years since 2009, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 

SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE

The operator of Alaska’s massive Red Dog mine says it wants to use the sun to help power the sprawling zinc operation, which currently burns expensive, imported fossil fuels.

If built, a newly proposed 8.8-megawatt solar farm at Red Dog would have slightly more capacity than the state’s largest existing farm, in the Susitna Valley north of Anchorage.

Unlike some of the state’s other large mines, Red Dog is completely off grid in a remote area of Northwest Alaska, hundreds of miles from the gas-, coal-, and oil-fired plants that power urban areas. That means the mine relies on millions of gallons a year of pricey, barged-in diesel for energy.

The new solar array and an accompanying battery system, according to mine operator Teck Resources, would boost energy supply in summer months, when power demand surges. And it’s expected to lower costs by reducing the amount of diesel Red Dog burns — roughly 40,000 gallons each day.

The project also aims to curb Red Dog’s greenhouse gas emissions — a company-wide goal for Teck and other global mining corporations.

The solar farm would be built at a pivotal moment for the mine.

Red Dog has been a major economic driver in rural Northwest Alaska for some three decades, sustaining high-paying jobs and substantial revenue for the borough government. But it’s running low on ore and is slated to close in 2032.

To keep the mine running, Teck has been studying whether tapping into two new mineral deposits could be profitable. The company plans to spend between $150 million and $180 million on the extension project this year alone. And future power demand is expected to exceed existing supply, the company said in a recent submission to state regulators.

The solar array could add capacity if the company decides to mine the new deposits. But it also would support mine closure, Teck said. After Red Dog stops operating, the company expects to continue treating more than one billion gallons of wastewater annually, according to the mine’s reclamation plans.

The solar farm would supply about 2 megawatts of electricity during the summer, according to Teck. That’s a fraction of the roughly 25 megawatts that Red Dog typically needs.

But “it is currently the most direct, achievable, and timely option for delivering a meaningful portion of required capacity,” Teck said.

The project would “return the most value” if Teck extends the mine’s life, a company spokesperson, Treena Wood, said in an email. But the extension project “must still advance through the planned project stages” independent of the solar proposal, she added.

Teck still anticipates a few more years of exploratory drilling and analysis before deciding whether to move ahead with the extension.

The solar farm, however, would likely happen a lot sooner: Teck wants construction to start by June. That’s a crucial deadline because lucrative federal tax credits created under the Biden administration expire in July — and without those incentives, the solar farm would not be financially viable, according to Teck.

Teck’s rush echoes a separate push by Anchorage’s urban utility, Chugach Electric Association, to build a solar farm on the west side of Cook Inlet in time to qualify for the credits. That project could produce up to 10 megawatts of power.

Other, larger-scale renewable energy projects — namely big wind farms — have stalled in Alaska as federal support and investment opportunities have dried up under the Trump administration.

But Red Dog’s proposal aligns with a global trend of mining companies moving away from fossil fuels to power their operations. And it shows that even in a political climate hostile to wind and solar, renewables are still attractive purely for economic reasons, according to Phil Wight, an energy historian and professor at University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Teck’s plans offer a glimpse of “what is economically rational in the private sector,” he said.

Other large mining companies operating in Alaska have warned in recent years that the state’s high energy costs and reliance on fossil fuels could thwart future investment.

Mines use huge amounts of energy to dig up ore and then crush and grind it to separate out valuable minerals. They’re among the state’s biggest power consumers. And electricity is among their biggest operating expenses.

Looking to cut costs, some companies that operate Alaska mines have been encouraging the state’s cooperatively-owned urban utilities — particularly in the Interior, where the grid runs partly on pricey, oil-based fuel — to expand their limited use of wind and solar power.

Red Dog would be the first large mine in the state to draw substantial energy from an on-site solar array.

The farm would span 30 acres, partly on land owned by Northwest Alaska’s regional Native-owned corporation, NANA.

A Canadian company, Tugliq Energy, would build and operate the project, according to Teck.

Teck and Tugliq are working out a contract that would set the price and other terms of power purchases, said Wood, the Teck spokesperson.

Tugliq is responsible for funding the project, she added. She declined to provide a cost estimate.

Northern Journal contributor Max Graham can be reached at max@northernjournal.com. He’s interested in any and all mining related stories, as well as introductory meetings with people in and around the industry.

This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Nathaniel Herz. Subscribe at this link.