Yeah, this has been all over the news up here.
The State of Alaska has serious budget problems - a several billion dollar budget deficit that our legislature seems unable to address. There's an old saying up here: "Please, God, just give us one more pipeline; we promise to not piss it away this time." "Pipeline", of course, refers to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that has funded the state for the last 40 years.
Even though Alaska oil production is less than 1/3 of the peak, most state revenue still comes from oil, so a big oil find would make most Alaskans quite happy. Delirious, in fact. Ecstatic. And of course it would most likely get pissed away again by our greedy legislature ...
ADN has fairly good reporting on the Repsol find:
https://www.adn.com/...st-got-a-lot-bigger/ I'm not sure how believable Repsol's reporting is. Conoco-Phillips Alaska reported a find earlier this year that is much smaller, but seems believable and will take much less time to get to market. And Caelus reported a really big offshore discovery last year, but they haven't proved it up yet and it's very far from processing facilities so is very much pie-in-the-sky at this point.
You probably wanted to make this about more than just Alaska, so I apologize for the drift.