Alaska’s oil revival sparks a new energy rush Into the Arctic

When John Kurz left Alaska’s North Slope in 2009, he was staring at a grim future for what had once been the country’s premiere oil field. Crude production had plummeted to 567,000 barrels per day, barely more than a quarter of the roughly 2 million barrels pumped daily at the field’s peak two decades earlier. The decline stoked concerns that the Trans Alaska Pipeline System, built to carry the state’s oil bounty to the continental US, might stop operating. Engineers even worried that slow-moving crude would congeal inside the pipeline, creating waxy buildup that could turn TAPS into the world’s biggest tube of ChapStick. “The industry was dying,” said Kurz, who at the time was BP Plc’s senior operations manager for Greater Prudhoe Bay. “We could see the end of TAPS coming.” Kurz fled Alaska for more promising opportunities overseas, but he was beckoned back in 2023 to run Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., overseeing the same pipeline whose future had looked so bleak 14 years before. He’s not the only one. Alaska has seen a resurgence of oil industry interest — and investment — driven by discoveries suggesting the state’s crude potential is far greater than previously expected and helped by more accommodating policies from the Trump administration. President Donald Trump has sought to accelerate oil production in Alaska, making the state a cornerstone of his energy-dominance agenda. Hours after his inauguration, Trump signed an order directing a suite of changes aimed at unlocking more of Alaska’s oil, gas and mineral riches. His Interior Department has lifted Biden-era restrictions barring drilling across much of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and is now drawing up plans to streamline permitting for oil projects in the territory. The efforts risk overturning decades of opposition from environmentalists who’ve fought to prevent industrial oil development in the territory, which spans roughly 23 million acres in northwest Alaska. They’ve argued that Arctic oil dev