Crude Reality (cont.) | Outside Online

Outside Magazine February 2004

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Crude Reality (cont.)

BEAUTIFUL DOWNTOWN DEADHORSE
IN THE HEART OF THE NORTHERN SUMMER, I boarded an Alaska Airlines 737 from Anchorage to Deadhorse, a Prudhoe Bay outpost composed almost entirely of seasonal oil workers. I climbed the aft stairway behind a surly 300-pound guy wearing a T-shirt that read, if you don't think hell freezes over, then you've never been to prudhoe bay. I recognized the attitude: Flying into Deadhorse for a months-long hitch was always like joining a planeload of convicts—albeit really well-paid ones—on their way to some industrial Devil's Island.

Life was easier now. "All I gotta do is my 14 days," the guy said. He worked the new norm—two weeks on, two weeks off—maintaining the more than 400 miles of gravel roads that spiderweb the North Slope. Those roads were clean now, he said. "They bake the gravel. Run it through a big outdoor oven and cook the oil out of it. You can eat off that gravel."

An appetizing image, perhaps, but I remembered dirtier days. The first time I was asked to illegally discharge slops into the Beaufort Sea came as a quiet request accompanied by a nod toward a giant red holding tank on the edge of the gravel shore near our camp at West Dock, on the blunt end of a causeway stretching off Prudhoe Bay's northwestern edge. A crew leader showed me how to stuff the hose into the gravel and open the valve, burying the seep of hydrocarbons and avoiding a telltale rainbow slick. To be fair, these practices were not the norm, and theoretically, at least, much had changed. A new Culture of Clean Oil emerged from the wreck of the Exxon Valdez, taking legal form in the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. OPA '90 sharpened the teeth of the Clean Water Act when it came to spills, but its real impact was accountability: It thrust criminal liability not only onto corporations but all the way down to employees like me.

A decade later, the industry's main argument is that oil production is dramatically cleaner than it was in what drillers like to call the "ram and cram" days. Now, drill bits as small as my fist snake their way four miles through the earth to previously inaccessible reservoirs, and isolated production "islands" make the sprawling well pads of old seem like vestiges of the Stone Age. In 1970, a 20-acre drill site could access 502 acres of subsurface area; by 2000, a six-acre site could reach more than 32,000. While industry touts this ability, watchdogs like the Wilderness Society charge that those claims are exaggerated: Extended-reach drilling isn't used as often or as effectively as oil companies would have us believe, and ice roads, lauded as the replacement for gravel infrastructure, place enormous stress on freshwater resources, something the 1002 doesn't have in abundance.

I wanted to see for myself. Of the more than 1,300 production wells in operation on the North Slope, those in ConocoPhillips's Alpine field, 70 miles west of Prudhoe near the Inupiat village of Nuiqsut, and BP's Northstar Island, six miles offshore from Prudhoe Bay, represent the state of the art. "Near-zero-discharge" facilities recycling everything from drilling waste to plastic-foam cups, these are the models for how ANWR would be drilled.

But after 9/11, security threw up a wide barrier, and journalists were about as welcome as terrorists. Oil-field press tours, I was informed, had been stopped. It didn't help matters that I was on assignment for Outside, which had published a critical article on ANWR drilling in 2000: As a leery representative of the BP subsidiary BP Exploration (Alaska) explained to me, the company was not eager to receive the same treatment again. Furthermore, he said in a subsequent conversation, he had read a New York Times Magazine column I'd written in 2001 about my part in the illegal discharge of slops in the early 1980s, and BP's legal department had brought it to the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency.

When access is as controlled as it is on the North Slope, it makes you wonder what's really going on. Barred from the oil fields, I roamed Deadhorse—really just a network of raised gravel roads connecting oil-field service companies—talking to the people I trusted most: the crews themselves. And a dozen workers all said the same thing: You had to watch every move you made. Improper disposal of oil would get you shipped back to Anchorage.

In the years I'd been gone, down-to-the-last-drop spill recovery had become big business, as I found over at the prefab aluminum headquarters of Alaska Clean Seas, an industry-owned nonprofit that coordinates oil-spill response on the Slope. ACS's 1980s precursor was an inept shell of a company called ABSORB, which ran an inept shell of a boat that I hardly saw move in ten years, much less clean up any oil. Now, as their planning director, Lee Majors, told me, ACS swings into action no matter how small the spill.

"If a front-end loader blows a hydraulic line on the ice road, we're out there with spoons, to get every drop," Majors said. He pointed out the window to a gravel pad occupied by a drilling contractor. "Look underneath—those are duck pans. Every single piece of equipment on the Slope has one." I did look, and looked for the next two days. Every loader, rig, road grader, and pickup sported strap-on plastic pans to catch leaking oil.

Just as OPA '90 arose from the slick of the Exxon Valdez, this new mania grew out of disaster. From 1993 to 1995, employees of Doyon Drilling, BP's drilling contractor at its Endicott Island facility, ten miles east of Prudhoe Bay, disposed of a dizzying array of solvents and petrochemicals by pumping them into underground voids. By 1999, both companies had pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court—Doyon for the dumping, and BP Exploration (Alaska) for concealing it from regulators. BP was put on five years' probation, and together they were slapped with $25 million in penalties. One Doyon employee went to jail.

At Doyon's industrial shop in Deadhorse, I ran into a casing foreman named Alec Luna, pressing a chisel into a grinder that sent a waterfall of sparks onto his feet. "What do you want?" he barked, as if he'd been waiting all these years to kick my ass. Luna talked loud, like he didn't give a damn who heard him.

"A lot of old hands will tell you it was better in the old days, but I ain't one of them," he said. "I seen a guy killed from me to you—guy gets hit in the side of the head by a sling of pipe, and boom! A human life is just gone, kids got no father, wife ain't even got the satisfaction of divorcing him." He laughed without mirth. "Seeing that makes you want to be better, makes you want to be safer."

Safety was one thing, but when I asked Luna about Endicott, he gave me that look again. "I ain't gonna talk about that," he said—he hadn't been there, and a lot of good men took the fall. "Bottom line," Luna told me, "you can't get away with being sloppy; flat-out truth is, you'll lose your job."

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