Alaska North Slope (ANS) crude oil production has been sliding for years — decades really — but that is poised to change in the second half of the 2020s. Two long-planned ANS projects — Pikka and Willow — are slated to start up in 2026 and 2029, respectively. By the early 2030s, these and other projects in the works could return North Slope production to levels not seen since the turn of the century. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss these projects and our new, long-term forecast for ANS oil production — a topic in our upcoming Future of Fuels report.
Let’s start with the main source of Alaska’s crude oil production: Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope. As we discussed in Keep Holding On, more than a half-century ago the 49th state was seen as the next big thing for U.S. oil. Massive oil deposits were discovered at Prudhoe Bay in the late 1960s –– and that promise soon became reality. With the completion of the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, AK, in 1977, ANS production took off like a rocket and by 1988 it exceeded 2 MMb/d. Not only did Alaska account for one-quarter of total U.S. crude oil output that year, it also briefly knocked Texas off its perch as the #1 oil-producing state.
Alaskan oil didn’t give the U.S. “energy independence” -– a rallying cry in the Ford, Carter and Reagan years –– but it helped. The physical characteristics of the North Slope’s medium sour-ish crude, with a 31.5 API gravity and about 1% sulfur (generally the cutoff we use to differentiate sweet and sour crude), were (and are) a plus. West Coast refineries were configured to run it, and the crude was — and is — very marketable in Asia too.
Figure 1. Alaskan Crude Oil Production, 1975-2024. Source: EIA
However, as shown in Figure 1 above, the picture quickly turned gloomy. Alaskan oil production peaked in 1988 and has headed downhill ever since as additional rounds of investments for new production ceased to materialize (see A Change Is Gonna Come). By 1995, Alaskan crude production had fallen to less than 1.5 MMb/d, and by 2000 it was down to less than 1 MMb/d. The slide didn’t end there. By the 2010s, production was hovering around 500 Mb/d, and in September 2024 (the most recent EIA stats available) it stood at about 408 Mb/d — or only 3% of total U.S. output (down from a peak of around 25% in 1988), which in August was at 13.4 MMb/d (right end of orange line in Figure 2 below). The issue isn’t that Alaska is running out of oil — far from it, as significant reserves still exist under the frozen tundra on the North Slope. However, Alaska’s energy industry has been thwarted by federal policies (most of the reserves were located on federally controlled land) as well as competition from shale producers in the Lower 48 who were largely unhindered by similar restrictions.
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