Today’s Key Takeaways: Long, shallow oil price war. AK default on tax credit payments could lead to lease revocation in Cook Inlet. Alaska Antimony heats up!! Donlin Gold deserves fair hearing.
OIL:
BofA Sees Saudis Embarking on Long But Shallow Oil-Price War
Alex Longley, Bloomberg, June 9, 2025
OPEC+’s oil-output hikes are part of a Saudi strategy that will see the kingdom embark on a long but shallow price war designed to recapture market share, Bank of America Corp.’s head of commodities research said.
The producer group, of which Saudi Arabia is the de-facto leader, announced a third output increase of more than 400,000 barrels a day last month, bigger than previously planned. The additions are reversing years of supply curbs that were aimed at keeping prices higher.
“It’s not a price war that is going to be short and steep; rather it’s going to be a price war that is long and shallow,” BofA’s Francisco Blanch said in a Bloomberg Television interview. That reflects a desire to take market share from US shale, which is in relatively good health but faces higher costs of production, he said.
The kingdom is also working to regain market share from fellow OPEC+ members, according to Blanch.
“They’ve done this price support already by themselves for three-plus years,” which has allowed competitors’ output to rise, he said. “They’re done with that.”
Blanch noted that the change in strategy is already producing results, with the latest US oil-drilling data from Baker Hughes Co. showing the lowest rig count in about four years.
GAS:
Amid gas crunch, Alaska could revoke leases from a company whose drilling has stalled
Nathaniel Herz, The Northern Journal, June 6, 2025
The Dunleavy administration is threatening to strip Texas-based BlueCrest Energy of oil and gas leases near Anchorage, saying it’s failed to advance development that could delay urban Alaska’s impending gas shortage.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration is threatening to strip a company of oil and gas leases in Cook Inlet outside Anchorage, saying it’s sitting on deposits that could delay an impending shortage of gas needed for heating and power generation in urban Alaska.
The Alaska Department of Natural Resources recently placed in “default” the Cosmopolitan Unit, a block leased by Texas-based BlueCrest Energy, saying it hasn’t met commitments to drill.
The company has held leases at Cosmopolitan for more than a decade. It conducted initial drilling several years ago but has not drilled any new wells since 2019, according to state records.
Company executives say that BlueCrest experienced a cash crunch when, amid a budget crisis beginning in 2014, the state of Alaska chose not to pay tax credits to oil firms that had spent money on drilling. BlueCrest has also had to ask Alaska’s economic development agency to approve delays in paying back a $30 million state loan.
The state’s new notice to BlueCrest, signed in May by Commissioner John Boyle, gives the company until Aug. 21 to show proof that it’s secured investment to drill a $55 million new oil well, as well as to advance development of a new offshore platform that would target natural gas.
That platform could cost $350 million or more, according to BlueCrest officials.
“We want to see aggressive, defined momentum towards putting our resources into active production,” Boyle said in an interview Thursday. “We need to see some drilling. We need to see some action.”
BlueCrest is negotiating with multiple companies about potential investment, Benjy Johnson, its chief executive, said in a phone interview.
“We’re hopeful that we’ll get it done,” he said. “I think we will.”
Johnson said he understands the state’s perspective, but added that defaulting BlueCrest’s leases is “not the solution to the problem.”
“The solution to the problem is helping us get funding to drill these wells, and to get the gas development going,” he said.
MINING:
Fueled by trade tensions and foreign wars, a rush for an obscure mineral heats up in Alaska
Max Graham, The Northern Journal, June 6, 2025
A Texas company recently acquired 50 square miles of mining claims across interior Alaska. Now it wants to start trucking antimony — a mineral used in weapons and solar panels — to its processing plant in Montana.
Alaska hasn’t produced antimony — a shiny mineral used in weapons, flame retardants and solar panels — in almost 40 years.
That could change this summer, according to the executives of a Texas company that has snatched up more than 35,000 acres of mining claims in Alaska.
Dallas-based U.S. Antimony Corp. is looking to the state as a new source of antimony for its smelter in Montana, the only plant in the United States that refines the mineral.
Alaska’s antimony, the company says, could help the U.S. overcome a recent ban on exports of the mineral from China, the world’s top antimony producer. Antimony is among several minerals — many of which are used in renewable energy — that the U.S. has sourced primarily from China and other countries in recent decades. Efforts to build more mines in the U.S. have accelerated amid worsening trade tensions and growing demand.
With no active antimony mines, the U.S. in recent years has imported roughly 60% of its antimony from China. Meanwhile, need for the mineral has surged as antimony-laden arms flow to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
The price of the mineral has quadrupled in the past year, rising from around $13,000 to $55,000 per ton.
U.S. Antimony is now expanding its Montana smelter and rushing to find more ore to supply it. Alaska is its “primary focus” for boosting production, an executive said in an interview last week.
In the past eight months, a U.S. Antimony subsidiary, Great Land Minerals, has acquired claims in three different areas of Alaska’s Interior: outside Fairbanks; near the small town of Tok; and along the Maclaren River off the Denali Highway, a scenic road that runs outside the national park.
U.S. Antimony says it’s looking to truck antimony ore some 2,000 miles from Alaska to its processing plant in Montana. That operation could start as soon as September, executives said on a recent call with investors.
“We can’t get that antimony from Alaska to Montana fast enough,” Joe Bardswich, U.S. Antimony’s chief mining officer, said on the call.
POLITICS:
Opinion: Donlin Gold deserves a fair hearing based on facts, not misinformation
Chuck Kopp, Anchorage Daily News, June 8, 2025
As someone who has long supported responsible natural resource development in Alaska, I’ve seen how misinformation can erode public trust and undermine opportunities — especially in regions where those opportunities are few and hard-won.
A recent opinion piece titled “Calista needs to stop running away from its shareholders and face the facts on Donlin” misrepresents both the Donlin Gold project and Calista Corp., which has consistently shown strong and thoughtful leadership in representing the interests of its shareholders and region.
Donlin Gold is not a reckless gamble. It’s one of the largest untapped gold deposits on Earth, with a 34-million-ounce reserve located in Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim region — an area larger than Pennsylvania that struggles with some of the highest energy costs and least developed infrastructure in the country. Donlin offers the kind of transformative, generational opportunity that rural Alaska has waited decades for.
This is not a rushed project. Donlin has been in development for over 30 years. In 2012, it entered the federal permitting process. After six years of exhaustive environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the project received its Clean Water Act Section 404 permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a federal right-of-way from the Bureau of Land Management. These were not rubber-stamped. Federal agencies applied the full weight of their technical expertise. Donlin met the test.
And after the permits were granted, over $220 million more was invested into the project and the surrounding region to prepare for development and support local communities.
Despite that, national environmental groups filed suit. In September 2024, the U.S. District Court for Alaska ruled against nearly every one of their claims. The only remaining issue is a narrow question about whether NEPA required additional analysis of a hypothetical worst-case tailings release. That’s not misconduct — that’s due process. And it’s already caused unnecessary delays.
The claim that Calista is ignoring its shareholders is simply false. Calista has been open, consistent and deeply engaged. Since the 1990s, more than 200 community meetings have been held to discuss the Donlin project. In just the past year, Calista and Donlin Gold conducted 18 separate community visits to provide updates and answer questions — not including open house events in Anchorage and Bethel.