Oil and gas companies are answering President Donald Trump’s call to “drill, baby drill” in Alaska, as the administration’s first auction for oil and gas leases in the North Slope drew hundreds of bids in what officials have called one of the “top sales” ever for the region.
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management held its first lease sale for the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska earlier today, garnering 430 bids on nearly 200 tracts spanning more than 1 million acres.
Overall, the lease sale generated nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, with the total high bids for successful bidders hitting $163 million. Half of the $163 million is set to go to the state of Alaska, officials said.
“The results of today’s sale are historic,” Kevin Pendergast, the state director for BLM in Alaska, said following the bid readings.
“This is the strongest sale we have ever had in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, by nearly every measure,” he added. “It makes clear that for the NPR-A, despite all of the successes to date, the best days are still ahead.”
Some of the top bidders included major oil and gas developers, such as ConocoPhillips, Repsol, Shell, and Frontier Oil and Gas.
The lease sale was announced in early February and offered more than 600 tracts across 5.5 million acres.
Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, BLM is required to hold no fewer than five lease sales in the NPR-A by 2035. Each sale must make at least 4 million acres available, effectively opening the entire reserve to oil and gas exploration and drilling.
The NPR-A is a roughly 23-million-acre area in Alaska’s North Slope Borough that was first set aside by President Warren Harding in 1923 as an emergency oil supply for the U.S. Navy.
In the 1970s, jurisdiction of the land was transferred to the Interior Department, opening it up to oil and gas development.
While the northern region of Alaska has been open for fossil fuel development for several decades, Republicans have repeatedly raised the criticism that only around 1.6 million acres have been leased in the region.
The Biden administration sought to curb drilling in the area, increasing environmental protections and regulations for roughly 13 million acres of the NPR-A, with the intent to conserve the environment, land, and habitats of wildlife such as caribou, migratory birds, and polar bears.
Trump and his administration have blasted these environmental rules as overreach, and the Interior Department moved to rescind the protections last fall.
Last November, Interior said BLM would manage the region under new regulations that align with those originally established by the agency in 1977, to reduce regulatory burden and “deliver full economic benefits” to the region.
The Trump administration has taken a multifaceted approach to expand fossil fuel development in Alaska, including steps to allow drilling onshore and offshore.
But there has been little movement from the industry to take advantage of the increased access.
Earlier this month, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management held its first offshore lease sale in the state’s Cook Inlet, but the auction failed to receive a single bid.
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The sale, which took place from Feb. 2 to March 4, was the first of at least six to take place between 2026 and 2032, as required by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Roughly 1 million acres in Alaska’s Cook Inlet were offered in the sale.
The last lease sale held by BOEM in the Cook Inlet was in 2022. At the time, the agency only received one bid.
