Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and Drilling for Oil

Outside Magazine February 2004

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Crude Reality (cont.)

IT'S NOT OVER YET
FROM 1980 TO 1989, I worked on Alaska's North Slope, crewing on barges for Crowley Maritime, a transportation company operating out of Prudhoe Bay, the largest of the Arctic oil fields. We built gravel islands for offshore oil rigs, ferried crews, and hauled prefabricated processing facilities up from the lower 48.

Back then, I knew nothing about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), whose origins date back to Public Land Order No. 2214, a 1960 executive action by the Eisenhower administration establishing the Arctic National Wildlife Range, an 8.9-million-acre wedge of unspoiled earth hugging the Canadian border. Nor did I know much about Jimmy Carter's Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), the 1980 law that federalized more than 100 million acres of Alaskan lands, redesignated the range a refuge, and more than doubled its size, to 19.5 million acres.

After dozens of interviews with analysts, native Alaskans, biologists, and congressional staffers, I became convinced of only one thing: Both sides are too entrenched to see the other side cleary.

While almost all of the original range was designated wilderness, Section 1002 of ANILCA deferred the status of 1.5 million acres of coastal plain, a treeless stretch of tundra about 100 miles wide by 30 miles deep—the 1002 ("Ten-Oh-Two") area—until the oil and gas potential could be measured and environmental impacts estimated. Locked within that study area lay the KIC lands, their ownership established by the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act but held in limbo by ANILCA—a battle of acronyms. In 1987, Secretary of the Interior Donald Hodel filed the department's findings with Congress, along with the Reagan administration's recommendation: The 1002 should be opened to development.

That never happened, primarily because of the Exxon Valdez, which in 1989 ran aground on Bligh Reef, in Prince William Sound, spilling 11 million gallons of crude all over industry plans to open ANWR. And in the years since I earned my little slice of the Alaskan pie, the place has become a political seesaw, a debate revisited with each new Congress and president. The George W. Bush administration hit the oil patch running, yet despite a Republican Congress and a powerful Alaska delegation led by GOP senator Ted Stevens, efforts to push ANWR drilling through the Senate have failed. In 2002, ANWR provisions were approved by the House, limiting development to 20 noncontiguous patches in the 1002 totaling 2,000 acres—one-tenth of one percent of the refuge. In the subsequent two years, that proposal failed repeatedly to overcome threats of a Senate filibuster, until it became clear that key Republicans wouldn't go to the wall over ANWR.

Chief among them was New Mexico's Republican warhorse, Pete Domenici, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. An insistent proponent of drilling, by the end of 2003 Domenici had indicated he had no intention of letting ANWR endanger his energy plan. Senate Republicans left ANWR out of the Energy Policy Act of 2003, while pushing oil and gas leasing in the Rockies, the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska's western Beaufort Sea, and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA), the 24.2-million-acre tract west of Prudhoe Bay set aside in 1923. On November 25, the 2003 energy bill failed the Senate yet again.

Environmentalists cried victory, but is it really over? I have listened to the debate over Arctic drilling for 20 years, and I believe it is far from finished, that it will never be finished until oil is obsolete or the first production wells start pumping ANWR crude into the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Election-year politics may have buried ANWR for now, but two points are clear: If reelected, George W. Bush will continue his pursuit of drilling in ANWR. And no matter who is elected, Alaskan lobbyists and politicians will never let this one go—there's simply too much at stake. "It's never decided," Senator Stevens has vowed several times, "until I win."

Meanwhile, both pro- and anti-drilling camps have dug their heels into the Arctic permafrost, each side deploying an array of facts and statistics, all of them "true," and most mutually exclusive. The Bush administration insists that, in the wake of 9/11, America's longtime goal of reversing dependence on foreign oil has become a necessity. The oil companies pledge that drilling can be done cleanly, thanks to new technologies like extended-reach drilling and man-made ice roads that melt every spring.

Environmentalists stress that any development is too much: The 1002 is home to the largest concentration of onshore polar bear dens in the world, the summer home to some 138 species of migratory birds, and the calving grounds of the 123,000-member Porcupine caribou herd. Even 2,000 acres of development, opponents argue, would create a maze of pipelines and service roads extending impacts a hundredfold. Moreover, they say, a defeat here will mortally wound the very idea of wilderness protection.

There's also the little matter of how much oil there is (no one really knows) and whether oil companies can ever be trusted as stewards (no one knows that, either). As if this weren't enough, native Alaskans themselves are divided: The Inupiat Eskimo of the North Slope largely favor drilling, but the Gwich'in Athabascans, to the south, don't.

I was divided myself. My family's ties to the oil business go back three generations. My grandfather was a tanker captain for Standard Oil, my father the president of Chevron Pipeline Company. My sister, brother-in-law, and cousin, not to mention half a dozen friends—oil people, all. On the North Slope, I'd gained intense respect for the people who work there, but I'd also seen the ways that the Arctic's harsh, remote conditions could drive crews to cut corners.

So, in 2002, I decided to drill into the issue—to drill into myself, frankly. My approach was admittedly personal. In my tiny way, I had helped bring drilling to ANWR, and I couldn't forget that bear as he escaped across the ice. I wondered, Is it possible to take care of the bear and still feed the machine?

After a journey that took me back to the Arctic for the first time in 13 years, and through dozens of interviews with policy analysts, native Alaskans, wildlife biologists, and congressional staff experts, I became convinced of only one thing: Both sides are far too entrenched to see the other side clearly.

It's time for a compromise, and as much as I can hear the cries of readers rising out of their chairs in choked protest, the reality of ANWR begs something new. Distasteful as it is, it's time to allow at least some drilling in the refuge.

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