Oil Price Plummet Should Signal State of Alaska to Act with “Energy Aggression”

March 10, 2020

Sunday’s announcement that Saudi Arabia and Russia’s fragile OPEC relationship had deteriorated, with the Russians refusing to go along with production cuts, led the world markets to react aggressively.  By pushing the futures price for oil below $30 – before settling back in the mid-$30s (it sits between $33 and $36 as of Tuesday morning) – billions of dollars of oil across the world will sit in the ground, as the price to produce many fields exceeds those numbers.

Alaska’s Arctic North Slope crude pricing (ANS) still hovered just under $50 per barrel on Friday, but it was down from a price above $57 just two weeks earlier.

With Alaska already facing a $1.5 billion gap in state spending – and with over half of all state revenues attributed to oil and gas development – any sustained pricing in the $30s will have an effect on energy jobs across our state.

Power The Future exists to advocate for energy jobs, to boost the understanding of how energy projects and their workers contribute to revenue streams, communities and healthy family structures across America, and to be a voice for responsibly increasing opportunities for workers in energy and resource development jobs across America.

With billions of barrels of oil and trillions of ounces of minerals and rare earth materials under Alaska’s permafrost and tundra, now is the time for Governor Dunleavy and the State Legislature to work together to move those projects forward.  If they make economic sense to develop, now is the time to push past the environmental extremists’ shallow rhetoric that we’ll harm our state by doing so. 

Alaska needs revenues.  Alaska needs hope.  Our state’s energy and development opportunities can provide both. Let’s move them forward.  Power The Future is ready, willing and able to assist however we can with this process.