Ninth Circuit Rejects ConocoPhillips's Bid to Keep NPR-A Wells From Disclosure

Ninth Circuit Rejects ConocoPhillips's Bid to Keep NPR-A Well Data Secret

Oil and gas operators drilling on federal land routinely assume that a single, coherent set of confidentiality rules governs their proprietary well data. That assumption took a hit on May 27, 2026, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the federal statute opening Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve to private development does not preempt the state's own, shorter confidentiality window for well data submitted to state regulators.¹ The decision reverses a win ConocoPhillips had secured in the district court and confirms that a company's federal, lease-based confidentiality protections do not automatically travel with data once it is independently submitted to a state agency.

The Ruling

In ConocoPhillips Alaska, Inc. v. Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a unanimous three-judge panel — Judges Jay Bybee, Michelle Friedland, and Eric Miller, who wrote for the court — reversed the District of Alaska's grant of partial summary judgment for ConocoPhillips, on which the district court entered final judgment with the parties' consent.² The company had argued that the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act of 1976 preempts Alaska Statute 31.05.035(c), which requires the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC) to keep well data confidential for only twenty-four months following the statutory filing period, after which it becomes public absent a state finding that the reports contain "significant information relating to the valuation of unleased land in the same vicinity."³ The Ninth Circuit rejected every preemption theory ConocoPhillips advanced, holding that neither the statute's text, the Department of the Interior's implementing regulations, nor the statute's purposes support displacing Alaska law.⁴ The panel reviewed the district court's preemption determination de novo.⁵

The case took an unusually long road to decision. The panel heard oral argument in May 2024, then vacated submission the following day; the case was not resubmitted and decided until May 27, 2026, two years later.⁶ The order vacating submission gave no reason, and the opinion offers none. Notably, the United States itself appeared as amicus curiae and sided against ConocoPhillips's preemption theory, even though ConocoPhillips's argument rested in part on the confidentiality of information the company submits to the Department of the Interior under its own federal leases — a detail suggesting the federal government did not see its own regulatory framework as supporting the company's position.⁷

The Statutory Backdrop

The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska is a nearly twenty-four-million-acre swath of the North Slope that the federal government set aside for naval oil reserves in 1923 and left largely undeveloped for the next half-century.⁸ The Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act transferred management of the Reserve to the Department of the Interior in 1976, and a 1980 amendment opened it to private leasing and exploration.⁹ Although the Reserve sits on federal land, it remains within Alaska's borders and subject to the state's concurrent regulatory jurisdiction under long-settled Supreme Court precedent.¹⁰ AOGCC accordingly requires drilling permits and well-data filings statewide, including within the Reserve — authority the agency exercised even before Congress opened the Reserve to private companies.¹¹

ConocoPhillips leased Reserve acreage from the federal government, obtained AOGCC drilling permits, and drilled several wells. To satisfy its federal lease terms, it submitted comprehensive well data to the Department of the Interior; to satisfy Alaska law, it submitted a subset of that data to AOGCC.¹² When Alaska's twenty-four-month confidentiality window on the state-held data lapsed, the Department of Natural Resources denied ConocoPhillips's request to extend it, prompting the company to sue on the theory that disclosure would destroy the trade-secret value of the data.¹³

Why the Court Found No Preemption

No express preemption in the statute itself. ConocoPhillips's strongest argument relied on a cross-reference: the Production Act says that data from Reserve exploration "shall be subject to the conditions of" a specific provision of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act — a data-submission requirement with no preemption language of its own.¹⁴ ConocoPhillips argued that reference implicitly pulled in a neighboring OCSLA provision that does expressly preempt state laws granting public access to privileged data. The panel rejected the maneuver: Congress's choice to cross-reference one OCSLA provision but not its neighbor "strongly suggests it acted intentionally and purposefully" in leaving the other out, and the word "conditions" in the statute means only the data-submission requirements themselves, not the surrounding statutory architecture.¹⁵ The court also stressed a structural point: unlike the Outer Continental Shelf, which is exclusively federal territory, the Reserve sits within a state that retains independent authority to collect and disclose its own oil and gas data — authority Alaska exercised before the Reserve was ever opened to private companies.¹⁶

No express preemption from federal regulations. ConocoPhillips also pointed to a Department of the Interior regulation barring public release of certain well data without the lessee's consent.¹⁷ The court found the regulation simply does not apply here: it was adopted under a different OCSLA provision than the one the Production Act actually incorporates, and by its own terms it governs only data submitted to the Interior Department for the Outer Continental Shelf — not data an operator independently files with a state agency under state law.¹⁸ As the panel put it, "a federal commitment not to disclose data obtained under its contracts does not preempt a State's decision to disclose data obtained under its own laws."¹⁹

No obstacle to Congress's purposes. Finally, the court held that Alaska's disclosure rule does not frustrate any identifiable congressional objective. The Production Act, the panel observed, "is silent on data confidentiality" altogether — it addresses leasing speed, Alaska's fifty-percent revenue share, and environmental regulation of surface activity, but says nothing about how long well data must remain secret.²⁰ The court also rejected the premise that longer confidentiality automatically serves exploration: noting that, "as the Supreme Court has recognized in the patent context," disclosing valuable knowledge can "stimulate ideas and the eventual development of further significant advances," the panel explained that deciding how long well data should remain confidential requires striking a balance between that effect and the incentive confidentiality creates — a balance the panel found Congress never struck by statute.²¹ And absent a clear congressional choice to displace overlapping state regulation, "[t]he mere fact that there is tension between federal and state law is not enough to establish" obstacle preemption.²²

Practical Implications

The decision draws a sharp line that operators drilling on federal land within a state's borders should take seriously: federal confidentiality commitments tied to a lease do not automatically extend to data an operator separately files with state regulators, even when the two data sets substantially overlap. Companies seeking longer confidentiality windows must make their case through the state's own administrative process — here, Alaska's Department of Natural Resources — rather than assume federal litigation will supply a shortcut. The ruling also reinforces a broader jurisdictional principle with implications beyond Alaska: on land subject to a state's concurrent jurisdiction, as opposed to the exclusively federal Outer Continental Shelf, courts will look for a clear congressional statement before finding that a federal leasing statute silently overrides a state's own disclosure rules.

The ruling is not limited to ConocoPhillips. Alaska law requires any company drilling in the Reserve to obtain a state permit, and, once it finishes drilling a well, to file data and reports describing that well with AOGCC — the same overlapping regime the Ninth Circuit has now construed.²³ Any operator hoping to keep state-filed data confidential beyond Alaska's twenty-four-month default will need to satisfy the state's own substantive standard — a finding by the Department of Natural Resources that the reports contain "significant information relating to the valuation of unleased land in the same vicinity" — rather than rely on the broader confidentiality protections that can attach to data submitted directly to Interior. The practical lesson is that the request belongs in the state forum, supported by a record built for that forum, because the panel has foreclosed the argument that federal lease confidentiality does the work instead.

Alaska officials, unsurprisingly, framed the decision as a win for both development and transparency. Acting Attorney General Cori Mills said the ruling confirms that "federal law has not overridden Alaska's balanced approach." The state's announcement also quoted a declaration AOGCC Commissioner Jessie Chmielowski had filed earlier in the litigation, which argued that placing well data in the public record allows competing companies "to evaluate different exploration concepts or interpretations based on seismic data that, without well data, are just educated guesses."²⁴ A company spokesperson said that ConocoPhillips had received the decision and was evaluating it and had not decided whether to appeal; contemporaneous reporting noted that the disputed well data had remained confidential for as long as the case was active.²⁵ Trade coverage published shortly afterward described the ruling as clearing the way for that data to be made public, and publicly available sources do not establish whether AOGCC has since released it.²⁶

Looking Ahead

The procedural window for further review has narrowed considerably. Under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 40, a petition for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc was due within fourteen days after entry of judgment, a deadline that ran in June 2026. What is left is a petition for a writ of certiorari, which Supreme Court Rule 13.1 requires to be filed within ninety days after entry of judgment — here, the last days of August 2026 — unless a Justice extends the time under Rule 13.5.²⁷ Because the panel's reasoning turns on a fairly technical statutory cross-reference — and because no other circuit appears to have construed this precise interaction between the Production Act and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act — the case does not present the sort of division among the circuits that most often draws the Supreme Court's attention. For operators, the more realistic posture is to treat the panel's construction as the governing rule rather than to wait on further review, particularly given the size of the confidentiality interest at stake across ConocoPhillips's broader North Slope portfolio and the number of Reserve wells that Alaska's twenty-four-month clock reaches.

In the meantime, the message for companies operating in the Reserve, and by extension on any federal land subject to a state's concurrent jurisdiction, is straightforward: do not assume federal confidentiality protections are self-executing against state disclosure law. Build the record for a state-law confidentiality extension request early, and do not wait for a federal court to supply protection the statute's text does not provide.

This article was written by Arnold D. Lee, an attorney in the Phoenix, Arizona office of Spencer Fane. For more information, visit spencerfane.com.