Trump's Interior Department generates record $164M from Alaska oil lease sale

The Bureau of Land Management held a competitive lease sale on March 18, 2026 for oil and gas drilling rights across 625 tracts covering approximately 5.5 million acres of Alaska's 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve. The sale generated $163,696,722 in high bids — the most revenue ever generated by an NPR-A lease sale, eclipsing the previous record of $104 million set during the first competitive lease sale in 1999. Eleven oil and gas companies submitted bids; nine won leases on 187 tracts totaling 1,334,967 acres. The sale was the first held in the National Petroleum Reserve since 2019, originally announced for March 9 before a public-notice error forced a brief delay, and was the first of at least five NPR-A lease sales required by Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act — which mandates the BLM offer no fewer than 4 million acres at each sale through 2035. ConocoPhillips was the largest winner, with high bids on 30 tracts; ExxonMobil committed more than $7 million across approximately 138,000 acres in a re-entry to North Slope leasing that surprised observers. Other named winners included Repsol (in partnership with Shell Frontier Oil and Gas, a Shell USA subsidiary), Australian producer Santos, Denver-based Armstrong Oil and Gas (via its North Slope Exploration LLC subsidiary), and Epoch Oil and Gas, which submitted the single highest bid at $3.7 million. Alaska receives approximately $82 million as its 50% statutory share of bid receipts.