ConocoPhillips is finding new oil in the Kuparuk field, in rock decades of drilling missed

The Kuparuk River field, the sprawling oil complex 40 miles west of Prudhoe Bay, is a shadow of what it was. At its height in 1992 it pumped 322,000 barrels a day. By 2024 it was down to about 63,000 — a slide of roughly 80 percent over three decades, the long decline of a field that started producing in 1981.

Then came Coyote.

In the northwest corner of the unit, ConocoPhillips Alaska has started developing a reservoir that generations of geologists drilled straight past. The Coyote interval sits in the Nanushuk formation, the same oil-rich rock behind the Willow and Pikka projects, but its signal was so faint on older instruments that the company says it was historically overlooked — buried in thin beds that blurred together on the logs. Better imaging brought it into focus. An exploration well flow-tested it in 2020; ConocoPhillips ran its own tests in 2021, drilled a producer-injector well pair in 2022 that it called very successful, and began full drilling in 2025.

ConocoPhillips estimates 500 million to 800 million barrels of oil originally in place across the Coyote area, developed from two drill sites, that are already built. It is one of several new projects the company is threading into the old field. Nuna, a satellite sanctioned in 2023, came online in early 2025 and adds around 20,000 barrels a day from 29 wells. Both send their oil to the existing Kuparuk processing plants rather than new ones.

The work shows up on the tundra as permit filings — a pad widened here, an access road extended there, a 19-well program approved somewhere else. ConocoPhillips's May application to expand the Kuparuk "12-Acre Pad" near Oliktok Point is one more of them.

North Slope oil funds much of Alaska's budget and the Permanent Fund dividend, and the trans-Alaska pipeline runs well below the volumes it was built for; every field that claws back production pushes against a decline the state has watched for years. Coyote and Nuna are part of a wider turn on the Slope, alongside Willow, Pikka and the restart of Point Thomson.

The new work lands in a lived-in place. The Kuparuk expansions sit near Oliktok Point on the Beaufort coast, close to Nuiqsut, the Inupiaq village that has spent years pressing the state and the companies over how fast the oil field is growing around it, and what the roads, pads and pipelines mean for the caribou and fish its families depend on. Each new pad is more gravel on the tundra. Each new reservoir is more reason for the industry to stay.