In an online conversation with Elon Musk on Monday, former President Donald Trump said he’d swiftly reopen the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling if he’s elected again.
Trump also suggested that the refuge in northeast Alaska could become one of the world’s top oil producers, even rivaling Saudi Arabia.
But the oil potential in the 19-million-acre refuge is not at all comparable to Saudi Arabia, though an official with the U.S. Geological Survey said Tuesday the Arctic Refuge coastal plain does contain significant pools of oil.
Trump, in the conversation on X, also blasted President Joe Biden’s administration for halting oil activity in the refuge, after the Trump administration issued exploration leases there in a lease sale in 2021 — though that sale generated few bids, including zero from major oil companies.
Before that, Alaska leaders and congressional Republicans long dreamed of seeing oil development in the refuge’s coastal plain, but conservation groups and many Democratic leaders successfully fended off those efforts for decades.
In the conversation with Musk, Trump said the refuge “could be bigger than Saudi Arabia. But they went in and they terminated it.”
“And I’ll get it going very quickly,” he said. “Because not only is it big for Alaska. I mean, you talk about economic development. That for the United States, I mean, that is, they say, bigger than Saudi Arabia or the same size, and pure, really good stuff.”
However, OPEC estimates put Saudi Arabia’s proven oil reserves at well over 200 billion barrels of oil. It has produced well over 150 billion barrels of oil over time, OPEC figures show.
The refuge’s coastal plain, where the lease sale was held, contains an estimated fraction of that amount, or 10.4 billion barrels of “technically recoverable oil” on average, the Congressional Research Service reported this summer.
Dave Houseknecht, senior research geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey and a leading expert on the topic, said ANWR’s oil potential is nowhere near Saudi Arabia’s.
“There’s no way,” Houseknecht said in an interview on Tuesday. “Not by any imagination.”
The Arctic refuge coastal plain estimates are based on a 1998 USGS report that Houseknecht helped develop. The USGS report was based on old 1980s seismic data that has not been updated by the federal government, he said.
Though it’s no Saudi Arabia, the report estimates that the refuge contains pools of oil that are comparable to large discoveries made in recent years in Alaska, far west of the refuge, Houseknecht said.
Some pools of oil could hold between 500 million to 750 million barrels of oil, Houseknecht said.
That puts them about the size of Willow, the controversial ConocoPhillips oil development that the Biden administration approved last year, and that climate activists called a “climate bomb.”
The biggest pools in the refuge might hold about 2 billion to 4 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, Houseknecht said.
That’s about the size of a pool of oil associated with the Pikka field, which is largely located on state land, he said. The Pikka discovery hasn’t generated the same national attention as Willow.
Oil production in the refuge would nonetheless face economic hurdles, Houseknecht said.
While some of the oil accumulations there are big, they’re not all connected, he said.
“The simplest way to think about it is it’s not all one big pool (in the refuge) that can be readily developed from a single location,” he said. “So that would ding the economic aspects.”
“But it’s still economically viable because the 1002 area is not a big area. It’s 1.5 million acres,” he said, referring to the refuge’s coastal plain that’s often called the 1002 area.
Trump in 2017 took a major step toward potential drilling in the refuge.
He signed the Tax Cut and Jobs Act after Alaska’s Republican delegation managed to add a provision for at least two lease sales in the refuge, a first.
But the federal government’s first-ever lease sale in 2021 indicated that — at least at the time — the oil industry had little interest in exploring the controversial area.
It came during a time of low oil prices, with many major banks saying they would not finance new Arctic oil and gas projects. And Joe Biden, the president-elect at the time, had said he opposed drilling in the refuge, another obstacle.
The sale produced a paltry $14.4 million in bids. That was a poor start to the federal government’s estimate that the two lease sales could generate $1.8 billion in revenue.
Only two small private companies submitted bids and later relinquished their leases under the Biden administration.
That left the main bidder, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority. The state agency is suing after the Biden administration canceled its leases last year, saying the federal government did not properly conduct an environmental review before the lease sale.
Under the 2017 law, a second lease sale must be held before Dec. 22 of this year.
The Biden administration has said it will determine by the end of September how the refuge oil program will proceed.
Will the administration hold a lease sale in time?
“We will follow the law,” said Melissa Schwartz, a spokesperson with the Interior Department, in an email on Tuesday.
