US Interior kicks off first NPR-A lease sale since 2019

The US Department of the Interior took its first steps toward a new oil and gas lease sale in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska Oct. 21, as the administration of US President Donald Trump begins fulfilling leases required by Republicans' 2025 budget reconciliation legislation.

Interior's Bureau of Land Management published a Call for Nominations and Comments in the Federal Register, a notice that BLM is seeking public and industry feedback on which areas of the NPR-A should be made available in an upcoming sale. BLM's release said the sale is planned for "this coming winter."

It will be the first NPR-A lease sale since 2019, and will follow a resurrected management plan from the first Trump administration that opened more than 80% of the reserve, including some ecologically contentious areas, to development, BLM said.

The comment period will be open until Nov. 21. After the comment period and a review, the agency will announce a Notice of Sale in the Federal Register at least 30 days before the sale.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 mandates five new NPR-A lease sales by 2035, with each sale offering at least 4 million acres. On his first day in office, Trump issued Executive Order 14153, which called on federal agencies to take every available action to "unleash" Alaska's "abundant and largely untapped supply of natural resources."

Political shifts

The announcement marked the latest in a series of contentious swings in the federal government's approach to the reserve. The 23 million-acre NPR-A is estimated to hold 895 million barrels of oil, per a 2010 US Geological Survey report, and is the largest federally managed tract of land -- and one environmentalists have increasingly sought to protect from further development.

"The Trump government clearly isn't shut down for the oil industry, with millions upon millions of Alaska's western Arctic recklessly open for exploitation and desecration," Cooper Freeman, Alaska Director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement Oct. 21.

American Petroleum Institute Vice President of Upstream Policy Holly Hopkins applauded the administration.

"Unlocking future oil and natural gas development in Alaska will bolster America's energy security while generating economic growth and revenue for local communities," she said in a statement.

NPR-A lease sales occurred annually from 2010 to 2019, including every year of Trump's first term. In 2020, Trump's Interior reversed previous administrations' protections on millions of acres of the NPR-A, including the environmentally sensitive Teshekpuk Lake in the northwest, making over 80% of the reserve open to leasing and development.

No NPR-A lease sales occurred under former US President Joe Biden, whose BLM returned to a 2013 management plan that set nearly half of the reserve off limits to leasing, in addition to other protections designed to limit the effects of climate change on local subsistence communities.

In 2024, Biden announced the permanent withdrawal of nearly 13 million acres in the reserve from future leasing -- a rule that outraged the oil industry, and which the Trump administration and others are currently challenging in court.

Still, in 2023 the Biden administration allowed ConocoPhillips' Willow Project -- the product of a Trump-era BLM approval -- to proceed, drawing condemnation from some supporters, who argued the administration had reversed its position on new oil leases on federal lands.

Willow, located on Alaska's North Slope in the northwest of the reserve, is currently under construction. It is expected to produce 180,000 b/d when it reaches its peak, according to the company, which has pledged to further explore its block of leases in the northeast.

In March, the US Energy Information Administration forecast Alaska's oil production to grow for the first time since 2017. Alaska production peaked at around 2 million b/d in 1988, but has steadily declined since. Increased production from Conoco's Nuna project, alongside Phase 1 of the Pikka development project jointly owned by Santos and Repsol, will drive the increased production, EIA said.

According to a BLM map released alongside the call for nominations, the federal government considers much of the southern and western reserve to have low potential for oil and gas production. But it sees high potential and further commercial interest in northeastern tracts.

Though the subject of its own political controversy, NPR-A has drawn far greater industry attention than the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, a nexus of environmentalist and conservation efforts. The Biden administration canceled two of the ANWR lease sales mandated by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, while large companies steered clear of a third.

"The lack of interest is not the case in NPR-A," Brett Watson, professor of Applied and Natural Resource Economics at the University of Alaska Anchorage, told Platts in September. "When those tracts become available, they tend to draw interest."