Today’s Key Takeaways: Western states say goodbye to green analyses. Canada prefers not to have AKLNG built. Count on Coal! Seizing opportunities for Alaska.
OIL:
US will no longer require green analyses on Western states’ oil, gas leases
Oil and Gas 360, April 10, 2025
The Trump administration said on Thursday that it will no longer require environmental impact statements for oil and gas leases across the U.S. West, in a step toward lifting green hurdles to drilling that environmental groups will likely challenge in court.
The Interior Department said in a release that it will no longer require its Bureau of Land Management to prepare environmental impact statements for about 3,244 oil and gas leases across Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming.
Environmental impact statements are detailed analyses on the impacts of federal actions that will have a significant effect on the environment. They are required for major projects by the bedrock 1970 U.S. environmental law the National Environmental Policy Act.
U.S. President Donald Trump has long sought to fight NEPA’s requirements. On January 20, his first day back in office, he signed an executive order aiming to speed up energy permitting by requiring the head of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality to propose doing away with its NEPA requirements, including consideration of greenhouse gas emissions of major projects.
Interior said that the BLM is evaluating options for compliance with NEPA for the oil and gas leasing decisions.
GAS:
Canada’s LNG industry set to take flight as interest reignites in Alaska megaproject
Lauren Krugel, The Canadian Press, April 14, 2025
Hundreds of kilometres up the Pacific coast from where Canada’s first liquefied natural gas export terminal is set to start up this summer, a monster lays dormant.
Alaska has long had ambitions to ship its natural gas to international markets, but the cost and scale of such an undertaking has held it back for decades.
But there’s been renewed interest in the megaproject since U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office devoted to Alaska resource development. State officials, including Gov. Mike Dunleavy, have been busy in recent weeks trying to woo potential Asian buyers of the gas under long-term contracts.
Industry experts have doubts the Alaska behemoth will awaken this time, but they say Canada must be mindful of the threat it could pose to its own nascent LNG industry.
“If there’s a time to build it, now would probably be your best bet,” Enverus senior analyst Josephine Mills said of the Trump administration’s keenness on Alaska gas and the Republicans’ control of Congress.
“But then again, this has been being talked about for the past 30, 40 years. It’s by no means a new project. So definitely I think it would be faced with a lot of hurdles to come.”
With an estimated price tag of US$44 billion, Alaska LNG would see a 1,300-kilometre pipeline traverse the state from north to south, passing through treacherous terrain to deliver an average of 3.5 million mmBTU a day of gas to a liquefaction plant in Nikiski, south of Anchorage. The project also includes a carbon capture plant by the gas fields on Alaska’s North Slope.
Some of the gas would be for Alaskans’ needs, but most would be loaded onto tankers and sold across the Pacific, the same markets Canadian LNG developers want to tap.
“It would be beneficial to Canada to not have Alaska LNG be built,” said Mills.
MINING:
Trump Signs Executive Orders to Revive the Coal Industry
Institute for Energy Research, April 10, 2025
- President Trump has signed a comprehensive set of executive orders seeking to bring coal back into the electricity generation mix of the United States, after its share of generation dropped from over half of electricity 25 years ago to around 16% today.
- Trump’s orders use existing authorities to direct existing coal plants to keep operating, allow the waiver of environmental rules implemented by states, reopen federal lands closed to coal leasing, and study metallurgical coal to determine if it is a critical mineral, which will benefit its production.
- The United States has the world’s largest proven coal reserves, and President Trump wants to use them to bolster baseload generation capacity in light of surging demand and reliability problems stemming from more intermittent sources.
- President Trump stressed the importance of affordable and reliable electricity for the growing AI field and manufacturing, which he is hoping to jump-start in the United States.
President Donald Trump has signed executive orders to boost the nation’s coal industry. The orders include efforts to save coal plants that were likely to be retired, drawing on existing emergency authority from the Federal Power Act that allows the Energy Secretary to direct any power plant to keep operating.
POLITICS:
Opinion: Seizing opportunities for Alaska with the Trump administration
Senator Dan Sullivan, Anchorage Daily News, April 14, 2025
I recently delivered my annual address to the Legislature in Juneau. I spoke about the success we’ve had in continuing our military build-up, including the possibility of re-opening the U.S. Navy base in Adak, to counter the unprecedented number of Russian and Chinese incursions near our air and waters.
I spoke about our veterans and how we’re continuing to work to make sure they get the benefits they have earned. We’ve also passed significant legislation, the Social Security Fairness Act, to ensure that our other outstanding public servants — like teachers, firefighters, police officers — get the Social Security benefits they have earned. I spoke about our focus on making aviation safer, and the work we’re doing to help our hard-working fishermen and coastal communities, all of whom have experienced very rough times recently.
But the heart of my speech centered on two visions for Alaska that have existed since statehood. One sees our state more run by an absent federal landlord who seeks to protect us and occasionally gives us scraps from the wealth of America’s table to keep us happy. This arrogant federal landlord view of Alaska reached its zenith under President Biden with his “Last Frontier lock-up” — 70 executive orders and actions exclusively focused on shutting down Alaska’s private sector economy, harming working families, and killing hundreds if not thousands of jobs.
The other vision, which I believe most Alaskans support, envisions unlocking the wealth of Alaska to create sustainable, private sector economic growth and good-paying jobs. With the stroke of a pen on his first day in office, President Trump fully endorsed this vision by issuing an Alaska-specific executive order that undoes much of the Biden lock-up and sent an unmistakable message that unleashing Alaska’s extraordinary resources and growing our economy is a top priority of his administration.
I encourage all Alaskans to read the EO, understand it, and most importantly, work to use it for the betterment of Alaskans. This executive order could help us achieve many of the big, long-sought ambitions in our state and create thousands of good-paying jobs.
To be clear, this EO is not a panacea. But we are the only state in the country that got one. Alaska has never seen such a positive signal directly from a U.S. president that we should pursue our vision of a state that seeks private sector wealth and job creation with a federal government that is a partner in opportunity, not a hostile opponent.
As I was delivering my speech in Juneau, the Interior Department released another order lifting the decades-obsolete Public Land Order 5150, long used to hinder major resource projects in our state. This order puts ANWR and NPR-A back on the table for responsible development and enables the State of Alaska to select lands along the Dalton Highway corridor for conveyance, including the land beneath the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, something Alaskans have been trying to get done since the 1970s.