In May, the first oil from a new field on Alaska’s North Slope arrived as a trickle of about 2,000 barrels a day. By September the Pikka field was producing 38,000 barrels a day, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration now forecasts that Alaska’s crude output will reach 505,000 barrels a day in 2027, the most since 2014. The agency laid out the forecast in a Today in Energy note dated Nov. 12.
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A rise of 60,000 barrels a day, or 13 percent, would also be the biggest one-year gain in Alaska since the 1980s.
Pikka’s climb from 2,000 to an expected 80,000 barrels a day
According to EIA’s note, Pikka Phase 1 is owned jointly by Santos and Repsol. It began producing in May 2026 at an initial monthly average of 2,000 barrels a day and reached 38,000 barrels a day in September, a figure EIA credits to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. EIA expects the field to peak at 80,000 barrels a day by winter 2026-27, nearly 20 percent of everything Alaska produced in 2025.
Pikka is not the only new barrel. ConocoPhillips’ Nuna project began producing in December 2024, is expected to peak at 20,000 barrels a day, and has averaged 10,000 so far in 2026. EIA’s outlook has also had to wait on the schedule. A year earlier, World Oil reported that EIA expected Pikka to start in early 2026 and reach about 80,000 barrels a day by mid-2026, and that it projected Alaska at 477,000 barrels a day for 2026. The November forecast instead has 2026 growing only 23,000 barrels a day, or 6 percent, which by simple subtraction from the 505,000 target implies roughly 445,000 barrels a day for the current year.
The reason for the faster schedule is in the wells. In the World Oil report, EIA said it raised its outlook on strong well test results and an accelerated ramp-up schedule from Santos, and Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission data showed new project wells averaging about 480 barrels of oil equivalent a day, while about 78 percent of Alaska wells produced below 400 barrels of oil equivalent a day in 2023. Nuna, in the same report, was delivering 7,000 barrels a day in August 2025 and offsetting declines from older fields, which is the quiet job all new North Slope barrels do before they add to the total.
Decades of decline, then a first in more than 40 years
Alaskan crude output peaked at 2.0 million barrels a day in the 1980s and then spent decades in decline. EIA says third-quarter 2026 output grew 4 percent, the first third-quarter increase in more than 40 years. Late summer is normally a soft spot, because maintenance work pulls output an average of 7 percent below first-quarter levels, so a third-quarter gain is a stronger signal than it first appears.
Scale matters here. A 505,000 barrel-a-day year would be about a quarter of the 2.0 million barrels a day Alaska produced at its 1980s peak, so the forecast describes a recovery from the bottom of a long slope, not a return to the old era. EIA’s own comparison is to 2014, when output last ran at that level, and the agency pins the 2027 gain on two new projects, Pikka and Nuna, rather than on the legacy fields that carried the state for decades.
The pipeline that carries the oil is busy. Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, which operates the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, reports on its own site that the line has moved 18 billion barrels since startup in 1977. October 2026 throughput totaled 16,306,200 barrels, about 526,006 barrels a day, with year-to-date throughput near 469,617 barrels a day and reliability of 99.87 percent. Pipeline throughput is a separate measure from EIA’s crude series, so the numbers are not directly comparable.
Two forecasters, one direction, different bases
EIA publishes the Alaska figure inside its monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook, and the November edition is the source for the 505,000 barrel figure. In the October edition the same outlook put total U.S. crude production at 13.9 million barrels a day in 2026 and 14.3 million in 2027, which would make Alaska’s 2027 forecast roughly 3.5 percent of the national total.
The state of Alaska is also counting on Pikka. In its December 2025 revenue forecast, reported by States Newsroom, the Alaska Department of Revenue expected oil production to rise from an average of 457,000 barrels a day to 517,800 in fiscal year 2027, and the Department of Natural Resources attributed the rise to Pikka and other new North Slope production. A state fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30, so that average covers a different twelve months than EIA’s calendar-year number.
The open question is the winter. EIA’s 2027 figure leans on Pikka reaching its 80,000 barrel-a-day peak, and the commission’s monthly production reports, the same data EIA used for the September rate, will show over the coming months whether the field stays on that schedule.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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