US and Australia strike critical minerals deal as Trump backs AUKUS
Indo Pacific Diaries, October 22, 2025
| WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump gave his blessing to AUKUS, the Biden-era three-way defense pact between the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, allowing Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to breathe a sigh of relief, after the Pentagon embarked on a review of the program earlier in the year. AUKUS has been going too slowly, the president said at the White House on Monday, without referencing the shipyard constraints that had triggered the review. “We do actually have a lot of submarines. We have the best submarines in the world, anywhere in the world, and we’re building a few more, currently under construction,” he said. “I think it’s really moving along very rapidly, very well.” U.S. Navy Secretary John Phelan, who also attended the meeting, said the plan is to “take the original AUKUS framework and improve it for all three parties, and make it better and clarify some of the ambiguity that was in the prior agreement. So it should be a win-win for everybody.” Read the full story here INTERIOR TAKES NEXT STEP TO OPEN ALASKA FOR DRILLING: The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management is publishing a call in the Federal Register this week for nominations and comments on what areas in the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska should be made available in an oil and gas lease sale this coming winter. It’s a crucial step toward deciding what plots of land will be made available for oil and gas leasing. The details: The lease sale is expected to be the first in the region since 2019 and is directed to take place under the Big, Beautiful Bill Act. Under the law, the agency is directed to hold no fewer than five lease sales in the NPR-A by 2035. As each sale is required to make at least 4 million acres available, this would make nearly the entire reserve open for oil and gas exploration and drilling. About the region: NPR-A, a roughly 23-million-acre area in Alaska’s North Slope Borough, was first set aside in 1923 as an emergency oil supply for the U.S. Navy. Jurisdiction of the land was transferred to the Interior Department in the 1970s, opening it up to oil and gas leasing. Since then, only around 1.6 million acres have been leased in the region. Read more from Callie here. From the Washington Examiner, Daily on Energy, October 21, 2025 Alaska’s $44 Billion LNG Project Nears Key Milestone as Pipeline Study Wraps Up | OilPrice.com Tsvetana Paraskova, OilPrice.Com, October 21, 2025 The proponents of the $44-billion Alaska LNG are expected to complete by the end of the year the crucial engineering and cost study for an 800-mile-long pipeline set to service the export project, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has said. “There’s a lot of optimism about the Alaska LNG project, and the FEED study should be coming out in December of this year, and I think that we’re going to see a lot of interest in that project,” Burgum said at an event hosted by the American Petroleum Institute (API), as carried by Reuters. The Alaska LNG project is designed to deliver North Slope natural gas to Alaskans and export LNG to U.S. allies across the Pacific. An 800-mile pipeline is planned to transport the gas from the production centers in the North Slope to south-central Alaska for exports. In addition, multiple gas interconnection points will ensure meeting in-state gas demand. The Alaska LNG project is a joint venture between U.S. energy developer Glenfarne Group and Alaska Gasline Development Corporation, a company owned by the state of Alaska. Energy companies are ready to commit to buying $115 billion worth of LNG from Alaska once President Donald Trump’s pet energy project gets done, Glenfarne said in June, noting that as many as 50 companies have expressed formal interest. U.S. officials toured Asia earlier this year in search of potential Asian investors in the LNG project. The LNG export facility is strongly supported by the Trump Administration, which has also been pressing Japan and South Korea to buy more LNG as a way to reduce America’s trade deficit with its Asian allies. Japanese and other Asian companies have been considering investments in the $44-billion Alaska LNG project, but so far they have appeared to be concerned that the costs may be too high, considering the cold weather in Alaska and the scale of the pipelines needed to bring the project on stream. |