America’s Arctic 2026 Update – QR Link

this page services the QR code printed in the Summer 2026 print issue and points to the final URL of the article via external link

Bids, not birds. That was the clear priority when the Trump administration held the highest value oil lease sale ever in the 103-year history of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, or NPR-A. The lease sale in March included parcels in and around the highly sensitive Teshekpuk Lake area.

Teshekpuk Lake—the largest lake in Alaska’s Arctic, home to globally significant breeding populations of shorebirds and waterbirds such as eiders and loons—is one of five Special Areas in the NPR-A designated for protection by Congress for significant ecological values. In 2024, the Biden administration announced rules codifying protections limiting oil and gas development within 13.3 million acres of the Special Areas. A year later, by Executive Order, President Trump removed those protections. 

Stan Senner, Audubon’s former vice president for bird conservation and former director of Audubon Alaska, says the Teshekpuk Lake area is the most important wetland complex in the Circumpolar Arctic for birds: “All of these birds, whether they’re swans, geese, shorebirds, jaegers, they’re all there because there’s 24 hours of sunlight, insects, small mammals, low predation. It’s just a Garden of Eden for Arctic-nesting birds.”

The Teshekpuk Lake area is also critical habitat for its namesake caribou herd, which the region’s Inupiat people rely on for subsistence. Three years ago, the Biden administration negotiated a deal with the village of Nuiqsut that granted the tribal government power to limit development across a million acres of caribou habitat within the Teshekpuk Lake area.

But last year the Trump administration canceled the agreement, saying it undermined the federal government’s ability to boost oil production within the NPR-A. Nuiqsut leaders filed suit and two days before the lease sale, U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason issued a temporary injunction ruling the agreement should remain in full force and effect.

More About the National Petroleum Reserve

• America’s Arctic: A Remote Patch of Oil-Rich Tundra That Teems with Migratory Birds

But the sale of 5.5 million acres within the NPR-A went forward, including tracts in and around Teshekpuk Lake. The sale attracted 11 companies that spent a record $163 million on bids for leases covering 1.3 million acres. It was the first of five sales mandated in the NPR-A over the next 10 years under the tax and budget bill passed by Congress in 2025. ExxonMobil, Epoch Resources, Shell, Repsol, North Slope Exploration, and ConocoPhillips all bid on vast tracts of tundra and wetlands within the Teshekpuk Lake area.

“It’s discouraging because much of the conservation community over the years has taken the position that there’s going to be some development in NPR-A, but we wanted to channel it into the areas that were the least harmful and protect the wildlife habitats that were the best,” says Senner. “And now that’s all essentially thrown out the window.”

Multiple lawsuits by the Center for Biological Diversity, Wilderness Society, and other environmental and local groups are challenging the Trump administration’s renewed push to drill across the NPR-A.

Senner says that he prefers to take the long view. He points out that even though the recent lease sale gives industry powerful legal claims to develop, no new wells have been drilled yet and it will be years before final decisions are made to start producing oil.

Senner hopes that even if this administration doesn’t consider the Special Areas to be special, “perhaps the next administration will.”