ANWR Oil
By Walter Hickel

The Senate Democrats have stubbornly refused to allow any oil exploration along the rim of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska. Despite this latest vote, however, the issue is not going to go away. Given our continuing precarious dependence on overseas oil suppliers ranging from Saddam Hussein to the Saudis to Venezuela's Castro-clone Hugo Chavez, sensible Americans will continue to press Congress in the months and years ahead to unlock America's great Arctic energy storehouse.

I'm an Alaskan who believes the coastal plain of ANWR should be opened for intelligent exploration of its energy potential. ANWR is owned by all Americans. The very small portion of the refuge with oil potential can be explored and drilled without damaging the environment. At a time when America is dependent for vital energy supplies on overseas oil-producing countries, some of which are allied with terrorist groups, it makes no sense for us to ignore a region within our own borders that could supply up to a third of a trillion dollars worth of domestic energy--enough to replace completely all imports from Saudi Arabia or Iraq for a generation. There are already 171 million acres of land in Alaska fenced off for conservation and wilderness preservation. That's an area larger than the state of Texas.

ANWR's coastal plain, the only part of the refuge where oil is suspected to exist, is a flat and featureless wasteland that experiences some of the harshest weather conditions in the world. Temperatures drop to nearly -70°F. There are no forests or trees. At all.

For ten months a year, the plain is covered with snow and ice and is devoid of most living things. Then, for a few weeks, a carpet of lichen and tundra emerges from beneath the snow. During that brief period, the migratory Porcupine caribou herd (named for the Porcupine River), one of Alaska's 20 caribou herds, may graze and calve on the plain. The animals seek breezes from the Beaufort Sea to help them cope with the blizzard of mosquitoes that hatch with the spring.

In 2001, the Porcupine herd didn't calve on the coastal plain. It gave birth to its young many miles to the east, across the Canadian border. It calved in Canada the previous year as well. There is nothing magical about the area.

It's unlikely that exploration and drilling on the coastal plain will harm the caribou. Most biologists expect the animals will react to the presence of human activity the same way the Central Arctic herd adjusted to oil development at Prudhoe Bay (the region to the immediate west of ANWR's coastal plain). That herd has not only survived, but flourished. In 1977, as the Prudhoe region started delivering oil to America's southern 48 states, the Central Arctic caribou herd numbered 6,000; it has since grown to 27,128.

It is important to note that in the Arctic, oil drilling is restricted to the wintertime. And from early fall to early May, the Porcupine herd is not on the coastal plain at all. It roams south to the Porcupine Mountains and east into Canada.

ANWR covers an enormous area--nearly as much as New Hampshire, Connecticut combined. The most beautiful sections of ANWR--8 million acres--are federally mandated wilderness areas where the only tolerated human activity is hiking, backpacking, camping, and rafting. No motorized vehicles are permitted, and no development of any kind is allowed. This wilderness heart of ANWR includes the mountains of the Brooks Range. Journalists often use images of these mountains when describing the coastal plain region and its rich energy supplies, but the Brooks Range will not be touched by development.

When it set up ANWR, Congress recognized that the 1.5 million acre coastal plain possesses unique potential for large oil and gas reserves. It was stipulated that these resources could be developed at any time if Congress so voted. As a result, scientists have studied this area for more than 20 years, and their work has produced estimates of recoverable oil ranging up to 16 billion barrels. Most of these scientists recommend that exploration be allowed.

To compare how much petroleum may lie beneath ANWR, consider that the entire rest of the U.S. contains 21 billion barrels of recoverable oil. The monetary value of ANWR's pumpable oil is projected by the U.S. Energy Information Agency to be between $125 billion and $350 billion. This doesn't even count the region's vast natural gas potential.

How much would an oil reservoir that size, just a few miles from the already-built-and-paid-for trans-Alaska pipeline, mean to America and our energy future? The government estimates the coastal plain could produce 600,000 to 1,900,000 barrels of oil per day. This new source of Alaskan oil could more than supplant all of our annual oil imports from Saudi Arabia or Iraq and ensure that the trans-Alaska oil pipeline would continue to deliver domestically produced energy to American consumers for decades to come.

I have visited many oil-producing regions throughout the world. The production techniques are often primitive and risky, both for the workers and the environment. The technology used in Alaska's Arctic to find and develop oil is the best in the world. When and if development takes place on the ANWR coastal plain, there will be little traceable disturbance. Seismic tests to locate the oil, and the actual drilling after that, will take place in the winter, using ice roads that will melt later. Small gravel drilling pads, only six acres in size, will be used to tap vast fields and will be removed when drilling is complet e.Alaska's "North Slope" oil workers take pride in challenging visitors to find any trace of winter work activities after the snow melts.

If oil is discovered in ANWR, the size of the surface area disturbed will be dramatically less than when Prudhoe Bay was developed 30 years ago. Experts estimate that less than 2,000 acres will be touched--out of the 1.5 million acres on the coastal plain, and the 19 million acres in ANWR as a whole.

The opposition to opening ANWR "isn't really economic, humanitarian, or even environmental. It is spiritual," wrote a New York Daily News columnist. "If all the oil in the refuge could be neatly sucked up with a single straw, the naturalists would still oppose it because [to them] human activity in a pristine wilderness is, in itself, an act of desecration."

That is an extreme philosophical position. America's access to energy is a serious national security issue. Overdependence on foreign oil exposes us to energy blackmail and compromises our ability to protect our citizens and assist our friends in times of crisis. Our goal as Americans must be to produce as much energy as we can for ourselves. This need not undermine efforts to conserve energy nor undercut the push to discover alternate energy sources. We must extend the energy sources that are practical today, even as we pursue possible alternatives for the future.

Rather than shutting down the Alaska pipeline and our other Arctic oil infrastructure we should be linking them to the vast untapped resources that await us on ANWR's coastal plain. That will not only make America safer and stronger economically; it will provide the rest of the world with an environmentally responsible model of how to produce energy the right way.

—Walter Hickel, former U.S. secretary of the interior, was twice governor of Alaska. This is adapted from his new book Crisis in the Commons: The Alaska Solution.