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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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