So it seems like these new investments are in a race. Will they pay off before they become stranded assets? The Saudis and other middle east countries have the lowest production costs, so unless Alaska can somehow keep costs to ~$20/barrel, I would not bet on it.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc... https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/trends-in...
https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-people-does-synthetic-fe...
When you dig a well, hit (hopefully) hit oil. As of the 2010s, we could extract oil from the fractures in the rocks using high pressure water. This is hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" as it's more commonly called.
Let's say that oil well produces 1000 barrels per day ("bpd"). Depending the oil field, the production decreases over time. For the Permian basin, which is currently the US's largest source of oil and it runs from West Texas through Oklahoma up into the Dakotas, that decline rate is 15-20%. For comparison, Saudi oil has a decline rate of 3-5%. In Saudi Arabia, you're basically just sticking a straw in the ground and hey presto, you have an oil well.
So after ~3 years, the output of your well has halved. That means, US production has to add ~2Mbpd of new oil wells every year just to maintain the ~13Mbpd of crude oil production. If we didn't drill a new well, our production would be ~6-7Mbpd in 3-4 years.
One issue with all this is that many in the industry fear we've hit peak oil production on the Permian basin and it's only going to go down from now. So we're looking for alternatives just to maintain our output.
Now, when people talk about the uses of oil, they tend to concentrate on cars and other forms of transportation. Cars have alternatives (ie EVs). Long-haul trucking is still reliant on diesel. There is no alternative to avgas currently. Or bunkers for ship fuel. Also, there are a bunch of non-energy uses for oil, such as industrial chemicals, plastics, construction (eg heavy oil for building roads). If you include strict non-energy uses it's 20-25% of cruel oil demand. If you include avgas, bunkers and even diesel, it's substantially higher.
Now, for trucking we could build out infrastructure for this but we haven't. China is doing this (of course). This would be a significant project.
I wrote another comment on this thread about the economics of Alaskan drilling. The tl'dr is it's... not good. And that's the biggest barrier. They've actually been trying to do this since 1980 and it's gone nowhere.