The Trump administration on Thursday announced a plan to allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the largest remaining tracts of pristine wilderness in the United States.
The decision was the latest twist in a long-running fight over the fate of the refuge’s coastal plain, an unspoiled expanse of 1.56 million acres that is believed to sit atop billions of barrels of oil but is also a critical habitat for polar bears, caribou, migratory birds and other wildlife.
During his first term, President Trump signed a 2017 tax bill that required two oil and gas lease sales in the coastal plain, but the Biden administration later suspended and then canceled those leases.
On Thursday, the Interior Department said it would hold an oil and gas lease sale in the coastal plain this winter. The agency also said it would reinstate seven oil leases in the refuge that the state of Alaska acquired in 2021 but that had been canceled two years later by the Biden administration.
“This land should and will be supporting responsible oil and gas leasing,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said during an “Alaska Day” event at the Interior Department’s headquarters, which came even as many Interior employees were furloughed during the ongoing government shutdown.
Mr. Burgum also announced that the Interior Department had finalized a deal that would allow a contentious gravel road to be built through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Alaska. And he reiterated that the agency would greenlight an industrial road that would cut through pristine wilderness to reach a proposed copper and zinc mine in northern Alaska.
Taken together, the decisions “represent a clear and unified message, which is Alaska is open for business,” Mr. Burgum said.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly promised to increase Arctic drilling as part of his plans to expand U.S. oil and gas production and achieve “American energy dominance.”
Yet major oil companies have previously shown little interest in drilling in the refuge largely because of the great expense and some concerns about public relations. It remains unclear whether they will bid in the upcoming auction.
Adding to these challenges, some major banks have committed to not finance drilling in the refuge. And environmental groups are expected to file lawsuits to try to block the lease sale.
“We will fight any attempt to industrialize the fragile coastal plain of the Arctic refuge and every option is on the table,” Kristen Miller, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League, wrote in an email.
The question of whether to drill in this remote refuge has fueled fierce political and legal battles for nearly a half-century.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which designated the majority of the refuge as wilderness and effectively barred drilling there. But congressional Republicans fought to end the ban, and they saw an opening in 2017, when they passed a tax bill that required two lease sales in the coastal plain by the end of 2024.
Both of those lease sales were widely considered to be flops. The first auction did not garner any bids from large oil companies, and seven of the nine leases were acquired by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state agency that promotes economic activity. The second sale did not attract a single bidder.
The upcoming lease sale “is not going to have 30 companies making gazillion-dollar bids,” said Dan Pickering, chief investment officer at Pickering Energy Partners, a Houston-based investment firm. “It’s probably going to be a fairly targeted group of companies that have existing infrastructure in the North Slope, and that list is not super long.”
No one truly knows how much crude oil lies beneath the refuge, where only one exploratory well has ever been drilled, in the mid-1980s. But the U.S. Geological Survey has estimated, based on seismic data, that the coastal plain contains between 4.3 billion and 11.8 billion barrels of oil. (For context, the United States produced a record 4.6 billion barrels of oil in 2024.)
At the same time, the refuge is home to the Southern Beaufort Sea’s remaining polar bears, with pregnant females creating dens in the snow to give birth to and raise their cubs. This denning habitat has become even more important as climate change has caused Arctic sea ice to melt and disappear.
“One of the worst things you can do for conserving polar bears is to industrialize their denning habitat,” said Patrick Lavin, an Alaska policy adviser at Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation group. “It’s adding insult to injury when human actions have already resulted in the loss of sea ice habitat.”
Alaska Native groups were split on the decision.
Nagruk Harcharek, president of Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, a group that represents Iñupiat organizations on Alaska’s North Slope and supports oil and gas projects, said the move would provide economic benefits. He noted that taxes on local oil and gas operations had funded basic services such as schools and running water.
“You couldn’t graduate high school on the North Slope until the North Slope Borough built K-12 schools in all of the communities” using oil and gas revenue, Mr. Harcharek said.
But Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, a coalition of Gwich’in tribal members in Alaska and neighboring parts of Canada that opposes oil development, said drilling in the refuge could threaten caribou that her people have hunted for centuries.
“Opening the coastal plain is a direct threat to our people, our culture and our future,” Ms. Moreland said.
The Interior Department also unveiled more details on Thursday about another issue that has reverberated across Alaska and the nation’s capital for decades: a land-swap deal that would facilitate a road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.
While details of the deal were not immediately available, it was expected to call for the agency to transfer 490 acres of land within Izembek to King Cove Corporation, a tribal organization that wants to build the road, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. In exchange, King Cove Corporation would give the government thousands of acres of its own land, some of which would be added to the refuge, the documents show.
Opponents of the road say it would cause irreparable harm to wildlife as well as many Alaska Native tribes that rely on hunting and fishing for food. In particular, they have warned that the road could fragment critical habitat for emperor geese and Pacific black brant geese, which converge on the refuge to feast on some of the world’s largest beds of eelgrass.
“I worry every day about what’s going to happen to the brant and emperor geese if there’s a road in Izembek,” Edgar Tall Sr., chief of the Native Village of Hooper Bay, said in a statement. “Our people hunt these birds together so we can learn from each other and teach our children how to hunt and take care of the land.”
Proponents say the road is essential for connecting the remote town of King Cove with an airport that could be used for emergency medical evacuations. Since 1980, at least 18 residents of King Cove have died because they could not receive medical attention in time.
“The Biden administration put the lives of birds over the lives of people,” Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska, said at the Interior Department event. “That ends today.”
The King Cove Corporation and local officials in King Cove could not immediately be reached for comment.
Lisa Friedman contributed reporting.
Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington.
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