Alaska Natives meet with White House officials on North Slope energy future

FIRST ON FOX: Alaska Natives and residents of the vast North Slope Borough communities along the Arctic Ocean got a rare chance this week to directly discuss their concerns with White House officials, typically 3,500 miles away in Washington.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin joined Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy and local residents in Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow) as part of a multi-day visit to the oil and gas fields, workers and neighbors in the frigid but crucial region.

Charles Lamp, a Native resident of Kaktovik – the main remote community within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) a few hundred miles eastward – said until President Donald Trump and the officials assembled in Utqiagvik took office, North Slope residents and their energy development hopes felt besieged by that same far-flung federal government.

Lamp voiced similar concerns to those Fox News Digital had been told in the past by Alaska officials, in that environmental activists in the Lower 48 and federal officials who ideologically align with them have tried speaking for them in opposition to developing ANWR and other sites where none of those same activists live.

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“There’s one thing that I want to bring up – we were under attack in Kaktovik by environmental groups,” Lamp said.

“On Day 1, President Trump told the Fish and Wildlife Department to deny their requests. And that was such an amazing thing for us to be able to see. And we were so proud of our president then because he made sure that our ancestral homelands weren’t going to be stolen – and [instead] protected,” Lamp said, as many in the North Slope actually support the development of their Native homelands versus cordoning them off through regulation – as they bring jobs and resources.

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“So I really need to bring back this immense gratitude to President Trump for that action and being able to write something that, if the other guy (Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) would have won, there’s no doubt in my mind that our homeland would have been stolen and there’s nothing we could have done about it,” he said.

“Trump had the heart and the wherewithal to be able to right this wrong.”

He told Burgum to invite Trump to Kaktovik to see ANWR and its “Section 1002” – the oil and gas development sector – for himself.

Burgum said he believes Trump would be open to the opportunity – and that the president has already pleasantly surprised regional corporate stakeholders with his openness to questions that the oil companies felt loath to even consider asking a president.

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“President Trump does care super deeply about this and at a deep level,” Burgum said, adding the president shocked ConocoPhillips representatives in a recent meeting when he asked what they needed to improve their North Slope operations.

When the company noted improved roads would be helpful, Trump asked rhetorically why a road couldn’t be built, according to Burgum. 

“[They] were kind of like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know we could ask that.’”

Wright also addressed the Utqiagvik meeting, and added in separate comments that he visited the Prudhoe Bay Discovery Well – a 1960s operation that first opened Alaska to energy development and at one point represented one-quarter of U.S. oil output.

“Unfortunately, the last few decades have seen a long, slow decline of North Slope oil production – not because they’re running out of oil. In fact, there’s an amazing amount of untapped, unproduced oil up here. It’s because of federal regulation, bureaucracy. It’s made it so expensive and difficult to operate,” Wright said.

He added that with the “Big, Beautiful, Twin Natural Gas Pipeline” ultimately constructed, Alaska could be the key to global energy security by drawing buyers in Korea and Japan away from China.

“It’s great to be part of history again here in the great North Slope oil fields of Alaska,” Wright said.

Dunleavy last week headlined a global sustainable energy conference in Anchorage, which also drew the attention of those same potential stakeholders from Asia.