Interior Department to Open Alaska’s Arctic to Drillers, Miners

All of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain and most of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska will be fully open to oil and gas leasing, the Interior Department announced Thursday.

The department also said it will convey federal lands to the state of Alaska, which would allow a 211-mile mining road to be built to the Ambler Mining District, which has rich deposits of copper and critical minerals.

The Interior Department pledged it would reopen 82% of the 23 million acre NPR-A to oil drillers. The department announced it would open all 1.5 million acres of the Arctic Coastal Plain within ANWR to drilling.

The move follows President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order reversing the Biden administration’s closures of much of northern Alaska to fossil fuels development. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in February issued a series of orders identifying at least 27 Biden administration conservation measures the department intends to roll back, including land and ecosystem protections in Alaska.

“The news today will provide more investment opportunities, more jobs, and a better future for Alaskans,” Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) said in a statement. “We look forward to our continued work with President Trump and his administration to move Alaska and our country forward.”

The Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation group, said the Trump administration plans to destroy irreplaceable wild places.

“Trump wants to dig, burn and dump his way across Alaska’s finest wildlife refuges and national parks, giving away our public lands to put more money into the pockets of billionaires,” Cooper Freeman, the center’s Alaska director, said in a statement.

Trump and Burgum have both said they intend to remove as many constraints to mining, logging, and oil and gas drilling on federal lands as possible and cast aside previous administrations’ measures to protect imperiled plants and animals, protect ecosystems, and address climate change.

Remote, mostly roadless northern Alaska makes up one of the largest remaining intact ecosystems in the US, where Indigenous people rely on free-roaming caribou for sustenance.

The Biden administration said fossil fuels development in the biologically diverse region would contribute to changing climate, which is warming the Arctic faster than anywhere else in North America and harming the region’s migratory birds, polar bears, and other species.