Major oil companies commit $163 million to North Slope projects

For a borough that gets about 83% of its operating revenue from oil and gas property taxes, the $163,696,722 federal lease sale in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska was more than a Wall Street number. It was a reminder that decisions made in Washington and at the auction table can ripple into Utqiagvik, Prudhoe Bay and the villages that depend on borough services, roads and schools.

The March 18 sale was the first NPR-A lease sale since 2019 and the first under President Donald J. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The Bureau of Land Management offered 625 tracts across about 5.5 million acres, and 11 companies submitted bids. In the end, 187 leases covering 1,334,967 acres changed hands, the Interior Department said. Alaska will receive nearly $82 million, or half the bid receipts, and part of that money is meant to support North Slope communities through the NPR-A Impact Mitigation program.

The scale of the result matters because the North Slope Borough’s fiscal year 2025-2026 operating budget is $547,764,021. Even when lease money does not land directly in borough accounts, it helps define the production base that pays local taxes and supports the public services that span nearly 95,000 square miles of northern Alaska. Interior said the sale produced the most revenue ever in an NPR-A auction, the most tracts receiving bids and the second-most acreage sold in a single sale.

The big spending also points to where the industry thinks the next long-term bets lie. Reuters reported that a Repsol-Shell joint venture was the top spender, bidding nearly $94 million for 42 tracts. ConocoPhillips bid more than $21 million for 30 tracts, and ExxonMobil won 138,000 acres. ConocoPhillips separately says its Willow project in the NPR-A is expected to begin production in 2029, with peak output of 180,000 barrels per day and an investment of $8.5 billion to $9 billion.

The geopolitical backdrop is part of the story, too. Two tankers have left Valdez for Asia in recent weeks, matching all Asia-bound shipments from 2025, and one cargo carried about 700,000 barrels of Alaska North Slope crude worth roughly $85 million at last week’s prices. That has raised Alaska’s value in a market rattled by the Strait of Hormuz disruption, but the North Slope test is simpler: whether this money becomes durable development, local contracts and steady revenue, or just another burst of bidding driven by a short-term global crisis.