Crude Reality (cont.) | Outside Online

Outside Magazine February 2004

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Crude Reality (cont.)

WHY—AND HOW—WE SHOULD DRILL
None of us can pretend that. So the issue becomes how to manage an energy transition that everybody agrees is under way. Sometime soon—by midcentury, perhaps—oil will cease to be a fossil fuel and become merely a fossil, but exactly when depends on how soon we can make the switch to alternative sources of energy.

That's a long way off, according to Justin Stiefel, chief of staff and energy policy analyst for Alaska's junior senator, Republican Lisa Murkowski. "I'm not against developing alternatives," said Stiefel. "We're going to need energy from every source we can get. But no matter how you slice it, fossil fuels are going to have to be part of that mix, and ANWR is the best domestic source to help do that."

Compromise is never easy. And I suggest this one with huge caveat: The public has a right to police ANWR development. But it's time to stop thinking of the 1002 as a monolith.

According to projections by the U.S. Department of Energy, the International Energy Agency, and the World Energy Council—take your pick—fossil fuels will account for around 75 percent of world energy use in 2020, with renewable sources like wind, solar, geothermal, and crop-based ethanol contributing only about 4 percent, and the remaining 21 percent coming from nuclear, hydropower, and traditional wood, crop, and animal-waste fuels. Even in best-case scenarios, if government policy suddenly pushed us away from fossil fuels, the WEC estimates that renewables will supply only 12 percent of world energy needs by that date.

Environmental groups point out that ANWR oil isn't going to make or break any of this—it's simply one field, a six-month supply to gas-guzzling Americans. But that assumes that ANWR oil would be the only source of energy used, a logic that, if applied elsewhere, suggests we'd burn through the Prudhoe Bay field, the largest in North America and in operation since 1977, in two and a half years. According to the United States Geological Survey, there are between 4.3 and 11.8 billion barrels under the 1002. At the current market price of $30 a barrel, the USGS estimates that 6.3 billion of those barrels are economically recoverable, compared with 5.6 billion in the NPRA, an area 16 times as large. That's a significant field by any reasonable measure.

Drilling opponents are right about American consumption, however: Conservation could save more energy than ANWR will ever provide. We can't produce our way out of dependence on foreign oil, and a comprehensive strategy for alternatives seems necessary if not inevitable. The Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund, and Greenpeace all argue that conservation is the cheapest and fastest way to make up for ANWR crude, and the National Resources Defense Council points out that the hype about hydrogen cells misses the mark, since the technology already exists to make 40-mile-per-gallon SUVs. But the two easiest ways to conserve fuel are to drive smaller cars and drive them more slowly, choices that have been available to the American consumer for a long time.

Free-market advocates like Jerry Taylor, director of natural resource studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, contend that Americans aren't willing to make the economic trade-off, not as long as gas is, when adjusted for inflation, less expensive than in 1955. Significant conservation won't happen, Taylor insists, until oil prices go up. His answer is to leave it to the market, letting private enterprise exploit new technologies as their prices become more competitive. "While it's conceivable that the developed world could, at great economic cost, shift rapidly away from fossil fuels," Taylor said, "there's simply no way that the rest of the world can do it without being consigned to a state of rank poverty."

In Kaktovik, such a risk is evident every day. ANWR oil might not be necessary to us, but it may be to the Inupiat—30 years of jobs and royalties are a hard thing to ignore. But so are the Gwich'in claims to their hunting grounds, and it strikes me as only reasonable to try to protect both.

In Kaktovik, I sat in a simple hotel room before a sunny midnight sky, staring at the polar ice pack, a sheaf of reports spread out before me. I found myself taking maps of the 1002 calving grounds compiled by Alaska Fish and Game and U.S. Fish and Wildlife and superimposing them over USGS estimates of oil distribution. It made for an illuminating picture. From 1983 to 2001, radio-collared female caribou concentrated like a shotgun blast in the south-central region of the 1002, with few calving in the northwestern third. According to the USGS, the bulk of the 1002 oil—as much as 85 percent—also lies in the northwestern third, above a formation called the Marsh Creek anticline, which divides the 1002 into two zones, the "undeformed" and the "deformed." The undeformed zone stretches north toward the Canning River delta—which could supply water for ice roads. It's also close to current oil development—which would limit infrastructure to a much greater degree than development in, say, the far reaches of the NPRA.

In March 2002, the USGS released five projections of oil drilling's impact on caribou in the 1002. The first involved development of the entire area and showed that 82.4 percent of calves would be displaced, by an average of 32 miles. But two other projections showed significantly less impact. One that included development of the undeformed zone as well as the KIC lands showed that only 35 percent would be displaced, and only by an average of three miles. According to wildlife biologists, those 29 miles could be the difference between irreparable harm to the herd and its long-term ability to adapt.

It's time to stop thinking of the 1002 as a monolith and to recognize that the political and geological assumptions that informed ANILCA are not the realities of today. Opening the undeformed zone and the KIC lands while declaring the rest of the 1002 a wilderness area makes sense on many levels, but mostly on a human level. It strikes me as a monumental injustice to allow development that would debilitate the Porcupine herd and the livelihood of the Gwich'in. At the same time, change has been wrought on the Inupiat through little choice of their own. It is equally unjust to agree to land settlements, only to revoke a people's ability to do with those lands what they please.

Compromise is never easy. And I suggest this one with a huge caveat: The public has a right to police this development. If the oil industry wants ANWR, the developers have to earn the public trust. The only way to do that is to open themselves to a new form of oversight, and not by the government. Rightly or wrongly, regulation tends to cause adversarialism—a feeling I know all too well. It leads to circumvention if not outright corruption. Substantial oversight should come from those who know the most and have the most at stake: environmental groups, scientists, and native Alaskans.

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