Nature Observation in Alaska - Footprints in the Last Wild Place (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine February 2003

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Footprints in the Last Wild Place (Cont.)

A LARGER PLANE FLEW THE EXPEDITION across the western section of the 1002 to the oil fields at Prudhoe Bay. By the time it left Kaktovik in late afternoon, the coast weather had turned colder, the sky was dark, with gusts and light rain, and a heavy sea fog swept like smoke across the Inupiat land. Some 60 miles west, near the Canning River, which separates the 1002 from the oil fields, we spotted perhaps 200 caribou wandering the plain, with another band of 30 or 40 not far away. These animals west of the 1002 belong to the so-called Central Arctic herd.

Soon the first drilling pad took shape in the blowing fog, its 12 ghostly wells lined up in two neat rows. Behind the well pumps were several huge rectangular reserve pits for the fluids used for cooling and lubrication. Thirty years of oil-field operations have produced millions of tons of "drilling muds," which nobody had figured out how to get rid of.

Beyond the first wells, roads and land scars gouged by tracked vehicles began accumulating. More drilling pads loomed dimly through the fog, which mercifully shrouds the wastelands of one of the earth's largest industrial sites; in the North Slope's oil fields, there are almost 4,000 wells, 500 miles of gravel roads, and 12 enormous flow stations that separate the oil from gas and water. The infrastructure is made all the more intrusive by airstrip construction, production facilities, sewage plants, and housing for workers.

For a time, Prudhoe's deposits of high-quality crude oil, readily "recovered" from permeable rock, were immensely profitable, delivering at their peak as many as two million barrels a day. But according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the extraction of oil and the resulting industrial burden on the North Slope also produced an annual toxic load of 56,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, some 24,000 to 114,000 metric tons of methane, and up to 11 metric tons of carbon dioxide, the chief component in the greenhouse gases implicated in global warming. The oil fields and pipeline still average about one spill daily; there were 1,600 recorded spills from 1996 to 1999 alone.

In support of its claim that future drilling in the 1002 will affect only a small area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the oil industry promises more precise mapping of deposits, horizontal drilling from smaller pads up to four miles away, and other new technology that it claims will reduce the size of its "footprint" on the tundra. The oil companies claim the damage might also be offset by limiting exploration to the winter months and using ice roads instead of digging gravel. But even if all this should work, to drill a new oil field efficiently would still require an estimated 280 miles of new roads and hundreds of miles of new pipelines. Realistic predictions of economically recoverable oil in the 1002, based on U.S. Geological Survey studies in 1998, work out to about 3.2 billion barrels (assuming a price of $20 a barrel), or less than a six-month supply for America's wasteful fossil fuel economy, which consumes 25 percent of the world's oil production while possessing only 3 percent of its known reserves. Drilling in the 1002 is no quick fix, for even if drilling is approved, most energy companies estimate that no oil would be ready for consumption for at least a decade. The Environmental Protection Agency has determined that if manufacturers increased the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks by just three miles per gallon, we would save more than a million barrels of oil a day—five times what the refuge could possibly supply—thus reducing the dread dependence on foreign oil far faster than the proposed drilling in our last great expanse of pristine land.

In any case, the westbound caribou, put off by the scaring din and reek in their home territory, would probably stop short of the 1002 and calve farther to the east, producing fewer young and altering the migration patterns on which the Gwich'in villages and the whole ecosystem depend. And this disruption of a fragile wilderness would almost certainly lead to widespread ecological degradation.

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