In Alaska, Senate Candidates Claim the Oil Industry Creates Local Jobs. It Doesn’t.

The U.S. Senate election in Alaska signals another red state on the brink of flipping blue, with polls showing voters narrowly preferring the Democratic nominee, former Rep. Mary Peltola, over Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan. Yet both candidates have something in common: support for oil and gas industry expansion in the state. The reasons are many, they say, but chief among them is that the industry creates good-paying jobs for Alaskans.

“Mary has always been a champion for Alaska energy, consistently standing up to anyone—including Joe Biden—to promote oil and gas development, secure approval of the Willow Oil Project, bring down costs, and create good-paying Alaska energy jobs,” reads a statement on Peltola’s website. “In the U.S. Senate, she will fight to lower Alaskans’ energy costs by modernizing energy infrastructure, pushing through meaningful permitting reform, and working alongside local communities to ensure the benefits of Alaska resources stay in Alaska.”

More from Whitney Curry Wimbish

The Willow Project is a gigantic $8 billion ConocoPhillips venture located on federally protected land. Peltola has said it is “frustrating” to hear the project referred to as a “carbon bomb,” as some environmental groups have argued. The environmental nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife says Willow stands to release “260 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere over the next 30 years.”

Sullivan also links oil and gas expansion with jobs for Alaskans.

“Alaska LNG is the single most important project for our state’s future. The possibilities are limitless: providing low-cost energy for our hard-working families and businesses throughout our state for generations, creating thousands of good-paying jobs, attracting new industries and investment, supplying energy to our Alaska-based military, and giving young Alaskans more opportunities to build their futures here,” Sullivan said in the Oval Office last week to celebrate a $54 billion investment members of the Trump administration said was coming from the South Korean government, which plans to produce liquefied natural gas for Asian markets. (Reuters subsequently reported that the industry minister of South Korea said “no decision has been made on whether to invest or on the size of the investment.”)

It may be natural for politicians to tout home-state industries as rich sources of local jobs. But in this case, it’s not exactly true.

“I love to play the game that two things can be true,” said Krystal Lapp, interim executive director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center. Officials aren’t lying when they say the industry creates jobs. Residents who point out a big chunk are not going to Alaskans? “They’re also not lying.”

THE NUMBER OF OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY JOBS going to nonresidents in Alaska has been growing for the last three years, according to the 2026 annual report on the subject. Researchers found that 40.5 percent of all oil and gas industry jobs went to nonresidents in 2024, the third consecutive year of record gains for nonresidents in the industry. That’s almost seven points higher than in 2017, when nonresidents held the lowest share of jobs in the last decade, at 33.6 percent.

The study defines residents as those who applied for a dividend from the Alaska Permanent Fund in either 2024 or 2025, because a person must live in the state for a full calendar year to be eligible. The Alaska Permanent Fund is the state’s $89 billion sovereign wealth fund that invests oil royalties across asset classes and pays residents a share of the revenue each year.

At the same time, federal data shows that the oil and gas industry is not necessarily the state’s economic backbone, as conventional wisdom holds. In 2024, just 2.5 percent of Alaska’s 413,867 workers were employed in oil and gas, according to the report. Nearly six times more residents worked in health care. Four times more worked in both retail and hospitality.

Learn more: Lessons From an Arctic Gas Pipe Dream

The percentage of nonresident workers in the industry increases sharply depending on the type of work and location, state data shows. The majority are employed in the remote North Slope Borough—more than 80 percent of the state’s oil and gas workers—and there, almost half are nonresidents. Nearly 60 percent of heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers are nonresidents, and more than half of workers in mobile heavy equipment machines, welders, cutters, solderers, and braziers are nonresidents.

Meanwhile, residents hold the majority of construction, roustabout, and “helper” jobs—more than 60 percent.

Nonresident workers in the oil and gas industry are also the ones drawing some of the biggest paychecks, the 2026 study showed. While they composed only about 4 percent of nonresident workers across industries in 2024, they made 13 percent of all nonresident wages that year, it found.

One-quarter of petroleum engineers were nonresidents; they made the second-highest average quarterly wage, at $71,735. Almost half of rotary drill and service unit operators were nonresidents; workers in those two job categories made respective quarterly averages of nearly $37,000 and $38,000.

PRESIDENT TRUMP WON ALASKA BY 13 POINTS IN 2024, yet final rounds in multiple polls in the ranked-choice voting state show Peltola with leads between one and seven points. As in other red states, Republicans are panicked about losing, and the GOP is pouring millions into an attempt to defeat Peltola, including by supporting fringe candidates. Peltola’s “fish, family and freedom” platform champions support for the state’s $5.2 billion fishing industry and says Trump’s domestic agenda has weakened it through his massive cuts to federal programs and his illegal war on Iran, which has driven up gas prices.

Oil and gas has been less of a focus for Peltola, but she has been a stalwart supporter of the industry, mirroring her opponent Sullivan’s position. So the Prospect asked both candidates how they planned to ensure that oil and gas expansion in their state would benefit Alaskans, given that a large share of jobs go to nonresidents.

“Mary knows that the oil and gas industry is the backbone of Alaska’s economy, and she will stand up to anyone to increase oil and gas development that creates good-paying jobs for Alaskans while also lowering energy costs for working families,” a spokesperson for Peltola said in an email. “Every Alaskan deserves the opportunity to build a life in the place they grew up, and Mary will always fight to create good paying jobs that give the next generation of Alaskans the economic certainty needed to build a future in Alaska.”

The spokesperson also said, “Critically, I wanted to point out that the premise of your inquiry isn’t borne out in the data,” and sent the same 2026 state report, saying that “nearly two-thirds (page 9) of Alaska oil & gas industry jobs go to Alaskans.” That is a generous reading of the 40.5 percent nonresident figure described above. The spokesperson added that “The mining and oil & gas industry only makes up 7% of Alaska’s non-resident workforce (page 4), a small percentage compared to manufacturing, hospitality, and other industries.”

The Prospect asked for clarification and for comment on other relevant data points, including findings about the increased percentage of jobs in the oil and gas industry going to nonresidents. The spokesman said “our statement is our statement,” declined to comment further on the record, and recommended seeking answers to any other questions by looking at the campaign website.

A spokesman for Sullivan responded to the Prospect’s question by saying the industry lost jobs under the Biden administration, which the data does not reflect. He said Sullivan planned to “create those opportunities and train Alaskans to fill them, not to stop projects like Democrats do every time they are in power,” though this Democratic opponent did not do that.

The Prospect asked for clarification because state data shows that the number of jobs in the oil and gas industry has increased since 2021. His response was that oil and gas was still well below 2015 levels but nearly all of that happened during the first Trump administration.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS RUSHING to build new oil and gas projects throughout Alaska following an executive order the president signed on his first day back in office, titled “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential.” The order squares with Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s goals. It outlined opening untouched Arctic National Wildlife Refuge land to oil and gas drilling, though the land is sacred to the indigenous Gwich’in. The order also proposed reversing Biden-era drilling limits in the North Slope.

Since the order, policymakers have been revoking regulations and fast-tracking oil and gas projects, cutting out environmental reviews and subsistence reviews. The latter are assessments of how development would impact hunting and fishing, critical activities Alaska natives rely on to survive.

Exploration alone stands to irreparably harm the fragile Arctic environment, said Bridget Psarianos, senior staff attorney at nonprofit environmental law firm Trustees for Alaska. That activity necessarily involves heavy equipment, such as bulldozers and 30,000-pound seismic “thumper trucks” that stomp the ground to identify oil reserves. Such equipment leaves lasting scars on the land, she said.

Psarianos said she tends to view lawmakers’ rhetoric about jobs “as propaganda … It’s just a way to make people think that this extractive industry is going to benefit everyone when it really is going to benefit billionaires who live in other states,” she said. “The sheer number of oil and gas workers that aren’t Alaska residents … is staggering.”

Texas-based ConocoPhillips is the state’s largest oil producer, for example; former chief executive Ryan Lance took home $23.5 million in reported compensation last year. Hilcorp is the state’s largest privately held oil and gas company; it is also based in Texas and its chief executive is Greg Lalicker. His salary is secret, but two years ago he bought a $24.7 million house, the second-most expensive ever sold in Houston, according to real estate industry data.

Oil and gas companies have for years received billions in tax credits. Psarianos pointed out that developers of new projects want them, too, like the Alaska LNG pipeline’s majority owner Glenfarne Group. Dunleavy has tried but so far failed to provide. He’s termed out this year, and there’s a tight election to replace him this fall, where Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tompkins is facing three Republicans.

Developers say, “Well, unless we don’t pay any taxes on this, we can’t afford to build it, and so how is that benefiting the state either?” Psarianos said. “We’re not getting jobs and we’re not getting tax revenue from this stuff.”