Oil started flowing last month at the huge Pikka project, co-owned and operated by Australian company Santos. And Repsol has plans to search for more oil and expand production on nearby land.
Meet the Spanish company at the heart of Alaska’s oil industry revival
Max Graham, Northern Journal, June 14th, 2026
Josu Jon Imaz, a former member of European Parliament, runs Spain’s largest oil company.
Recently, though, his focus has drifted thousands of miles from Madrid to the far north.
Imaz’s company, Repsol, is one of several oil and gas businesses racing to drill in Alaska’s Arctic — where, after a decades-long decline in production, the industry is undergoing a stunning revival amid a push by the Trump administration to open new areas to development.
American oil firms like ConocoPhillips and Hilcorp operate larger fields in the state and have tended to get more attention.
But Repsol is quickly emerging as one of the industry’s most zealous players on the North Slope, where the company and its partners have snatched up hundreds of thousands of acres of oil and gas leases since last fall and recently began production at a multibillion-dollar new field, Pikka.
“It’s an area that could change, in some way, the history of Repsol,” Imaz said in a May interview with Northern Journal on the sidelines of an energy conference in Anchorage.
In a series of speeches this spring, Imaz described Alaska as a “company-maker” for Repsol. The company has spent less money in the state than other players, but it’s significantly smaller than U.S. giants like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips — so each dollar it spends represents a comparatively larger gamble.
The U.S.-Iran deal and the potentially imminent reopening of the Strait of Hormuz do not mean that oil and gas trade will quickly return to its previous levels.
U.S.-Iran Deal Doesn’t Mean a Swift Return of Oil and Gas Flows
Tsvetana Paraskova, OilPrice.Com, June 15, 2026
- A U.S.-Iran agreement could reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but shipping and production will not immediately return to normal.
- More than 10 million bpd of Middle Eastern oil production has been shut in, and some fields may take months to restart fully.
- Iraq faces a slower recovery than Saudi Arabia or the UAE because its southern exports depend heavily on access through Basrah.
The U.S.-Iran deal and the potentially imminent reopening of the Strait of Hormuz do not mean that oil and gas trade will quickly return to its previous levels. The announcement of the deal is just the first step, and it could take months for oil and gas shipments in the region to return to pre-war levels.
Middle Eastern producers have been forced to shut in more than 10 million barrels per day of oil production since the Strait of Hormuz was closed three and a half months ago. Producers will need months to fully ramp up wells to previous output levels, while the status of the Strait of Hormuz – even if it re-opens on Friday as expected – is still unclear.
“We don’t know what open means or what the speed of evacuation of trapped material is going to be,” Daniel Sternoff, senior fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told AP late on Sunday.
Some producers like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would be quicker to restore output compared to Iraq, for example, which had to curtail the highest proportion of its production due to its inability to move the crude out of its southern fields through Basrah.
“Places like Iraq could be much more challenged because they’ve had a much bigger shut-in, their fields are more difficult,” Alan Gelder, senior vice president of refining, chemicals, and oil markets at Wood Mackenzie, said.
“It may well take about a year before they get back,” the expert told AP.
Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person, bought a more-than $1 billion stake in SpaceX via Hancock Prospecting.
Mining Tycoon Gina Rinehart Buys Over $1 Billion SpaceX Stake
Rhiannon Hoyle, The Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2026 (subscription required)
Hancock said it is interested in working with SpaceX in the future
The stake in SpaceX, which last week pulled off the largest initial public offering ever, is the single largest investment outside of iron ore made by her closely held company, Hancock Prospecting, one of the world’s major exporters of the steelmaking commodity.
The investment reflects Hancock’s confidence in Musk and recognizes the need for the West to keep investing in technology and innovation, Rinehart said in emailed remarks on Monday.
We see SpaceX as a rare business: led by a truly exceptional person, technically exceptional and operating in sectors that are crucial, and with long-term potential,” she said. Rinehart didn’t specify the value of the investment but a person familiar with the investment said it was valued in excess of $1 billion.
Last week’s historic IPO, powered by an army of individual investors, turned SpaceX into one of the U.S.’s most-valuable listed companies and Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, into the world’s first trillionaire. The company ended its first day of trading Friday with a market value of $2.1 trillion.