Federal judge allows winter oil and gas exploration in Alaska preserve

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A federal judge ruled that ConocoPhillips Alaska can continue with planned winter oil and gas exploration in a portion of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, rejecting an emergency request from project opponents to halt the work while their lawsuit targets federal authorization. U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason denied the bid to stop the program after concluding that the challengers had not met the threshold required to pause it.

Gleason’s order, dated Tuesday, turned on whether the groups challenging the project had shown they were likely to succeed in their underlying case. She said conservation groups and Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic had not demonstrated they have a “fair chance of success” on the merits of their claims, according to the court decision described by attorneys and filings in the case.

The dispute centers on how the U.S. Bureau of Land Management assessed ConocoPhillips Alaska’s proposed winter activities in the reserve and how the agency authorized the program. The opponents said the federal government improperly analyzed the drilling program and that the review process around ConocoPhillips Alaska’s application and subsequent approval was rushed and lacked transparency.

Gleason’s ruling came after a mobile drilling rig the company planned to use toppled onto snow-covered tundra near existing oil and gas infrastructure while being transported last week, according to a ConocoPhillips Alaska court filing cited in the reporting. Attorneys for the company said the incident would not deter ConocoPhillips Alaska’s overall plans and said a substitute drill rig would be used.

The petroleum reserve is described as an area roughly the size of Indiana on Alaska’s North Slope and has become a focal point of increased oil and gas development in the state, supported by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans. A law passed last year calls for at least five lease sales in the reserve over a 10-year period, with the last lease sale held in 2019.

The challenge to ConocoPhillips Alaska’s winter program includes allegations about the government’s approval process after the Bureau of Land Management approved a program proposed by ConocoPhillips Alaska in late November. That plan included seismic surveys aimed at helping identify oil and gas reserves and called for drilling four exploration wells.

After the late-November approval, the Bureau of Land Management issued a revised approval in December, according to the reporting, saying the revision took into account recent changes in the broader leasing framework, including the Trump administration’s adoption of a plan that would reopen most of the reserve to leasing. The plaintiffs, however, said in a court filing that the revised approval did not address their concerns.

The opponents said the activities would occur near existing ConocoPhillips Alaska developments, including the large Willow oil project approved by the Biden administration in 2023 and currently under development, and they argued the planned winter program could harm caribou and bird habitat areas. They pointed to the broader need to balance oil-and-gas activity with protection of resources in the reserve, which contains tundra, wetlands, rivers and lakes and is described as habitat for migratory birds, caribou, polar bears and arctic foxes.

Gleason said the Bureau of Land Management was not required to prevent all impacts to surface resources in the reserve. She said the agency conducted a reasonably thorough analysis of the impacts of the winter program on tundra in the project area across different types of vegetation and highlighted planned mitigation measures in its analysis.

The lawsuit names as defendants the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management, along with top agency officials including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. ConocoPhillips Alaska filed as an intervenor in support of the government’s actions, and the company said in a statement that it welcomed the decision and looked forward to building on what it described as its track record of responsibly exploring and developing Alaska’s resources.

Earthjustice attorney Ian Dooley, representing the plaintiffs, said the ruling does not end the challenge to the exploration program. In his statement, Dooley called it “remarkable” that the Bureau of Land Management had not on its own halted the project to determine the cause of the rig collapse, and he said the agency’s lack of action was consistent with a rushed process that prioritized extraction over protecting the reserve’s environment and the people who live in and use it.

In filings associated with the case, ConocoPhillips Alaska’s exploration manager Brandi Sellepack said the company had invested “tens of millions of dollars” on the winter program and that the investment cannot be recovered if the program were blocked for the winter. Sellepack also said information from exploration activities is vital to determining whether future investment in leases is warranted, arguing that timely exploration is important to preserving lease rights, even though exploration, construction and development in the reserve are described as slow and constrained by remote conditions and short construction seasons typically limited to winter.