Reporting for this article was made possible by a Braided River Overlooked and Untold Alaska Journalism Grant. You can find out more at braidedriver.org.
An arctic wind cut across Prudhoe Bay, sending spindrifts swirling as Energy Secretary Chris Wright stepped onto a podium hastily erected among oil wells and pump stations. The gray summer sunlight scattered over ice-rimmed ponds, shadows gathering in the hollows of low heaves and stretching over the tundra. But the visitors gathered around him were less interested in the scenery than what lay beneath it.
Wearing a hard hat perched above a pair of safety glasses, Wright gripped a lectern with red-knuckled hands chilled by the cold air. “I want to say to all of you standing here today,” he told a gaggle of oil workers, “you are the greatest liberators in human history.”
From left: U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan takes a selfie with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, an energy worker, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Andrew King / DOI
Hovering nearby were Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency. It was the kind of Cabinet-level entourage that made the remote industrial site feel like a campaign stop. They were on a multiday tour of northern Alaska, hyping plans for a pipeline that would carry natural gas roughly 800 miles south to an export terminal on Cook Inlet. If built, it would be one of the largest infrastructure projects in U.S. history.
