JUNEAU, Alaska — President-elect Donald Trump promised repeatedly during his campaign to expand oil drilling in the United States, which is good news for political leaders in Alaska, where oil is the lifeblood of the economy and many have felt that the Biden administration had hampered efforts to boost the state’s diminished production.

The debate over drilling on federal lands in Alaska’s oil-rich North Slope will likely be reignited in the coming months, particularly in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which environmentalists have long sought to protect as one of the last wild places in the country.

The issue of drilling on the refuge’s coastal plain, as Trump sought to do during his first term, also divides Alaska Native communities. Some welcome the potential new revenue, while others worry about the impact it will have on wildlife in an area they consider sacred.

The nation’s largest wildlife refuge covers an area of ​​northeast Alaska roughly the size of South Carolina. It features a diverse landscape of mountains and glaciers, tundra plains, rivers and boreal forest, and is home to a variety of wildlife including polar bears, caribou, muskoxen and birds.

The fight over whether to drill in the refuge’s coastal plain along the Beaufort Sea goes back decades. Proponents of drilling say the development could create thousands of jobs, generate billions of dollars in revenue and boost U.S. oil production.

Although the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has said the coastal plain could contain between 4.25 and 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil, information on the quantity and quality of the oil is limited. And it’s unclear whether companies will want to take the risk of pursuing projects that could become bogged down in litigation. Environmentalists and climate scientists have pushed for the phase-out of fossil fuels to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

The refuge is east of the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and the Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, where the Biden administration endorsed the controversial Willow oil project but also about half the oil reserve is prohibited for oil and gas rental.

An exploratory well was drilled in the 1980s on land where Alaska Native corporations held rights, but little information has been released about the results.

Still, opening the coastal plain to drilling has been a long-standing goal for members of Alaska’s congressional delegation. In 2017, they added language to a tax bill requiring two oil and gas lease sales by the end of 2024.

The first sale took place in the final days of the last Trump administration, but President Joe Biden quickly called on Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to review the rental program.

This led to cancellation of seven leases which had been acquired by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state-owned corporation. Small businesses gave up two other leases. Litigation is ongoing regarding the canceled leases.

The Biden administration recently released a new environmental assessment, ahead of the deadline for the required second sale. He proposes to offer what the Bureau of Land Management said would be the minimum acreage allowed under the 2017 law — a proposal that Alaska’s Republican U.S. senators presented as a parody of the law intended to encourage exploration.

There are sharp divisions.

Leaders of the Iñupiaq community of Kaktovik, which is inside the refuge, support the drilling. Gwich’in leaders in communities near the refuge said they consider the coastal plain sacred. There, caribou depend on calves.

Galen Gilbert, first chief of the Arctic Village Council, said the refuge should be closed to drilling. Arctic Village is a Neets’aii Gwich’in community.

“We don’t want to bother anyone. We don’t want anything. We just want our way of life, not only for us, but for our future generations,” Gilbert said.

Kaktovik leaders have pledged to fight any attempt by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to designate these lands as sacred. Josiah Patkotak, mayor of the North Slope borough, which includes Kaktovik, said in an October opinion piece that the land “was never” Gwich’in territory.

“The federal government must understand that any attempt to undermine our sovereignty will be met with fierce resistance,” he wrote.

Oil is vital to the economic well-being of North Slope communities, said Nagruk Harcharek, president of Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, a nonprofit advocacy group whose members include leaders from that region. Responsible development has long coexisted with subsistence lifestyles, he said.

In a video posted to X by Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Trump said he would work to ensure construction of a natural gas pipeline project long sought by the state’s political leaders. The project, contested by environmentalists, faltered over the years due to policy changes under different governors, cost concerns and other factors.

Although voters “may not have been head over heels” for Trump, “they appreciated that his policies, when it comes to resource development, are clearly policies that benefit an economy like that of Alaska,” U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski told reporters. .

“So I expect that we will see, once again, a return to greater economic opportunity through resource development,” she said.

Dunleavy said Trump could reverse the Biden administration’s restrictions on new oil and gas leasing on 13 million acres (5.3 million hectares) of oil reserves. Harcharek’s group filed suit against the restrictions, arguing that the region’s elected leaders had been ignored.

Erik Grafe, an attorney with Earthjustice in Alaska, said oil reserves were not set aside “to extract oil at all costs.” Other important resources need to be considered and given protections under the law, he said.

“Oil is not the future and it cannot be,” Grafe said. “The state must start thinking about a plan B, after oil.”