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Alaska's North Slope
MAY 2006
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| Fall of the Wild (continued) |
By Joel K. Bourne, Jr.
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Photographs by Joel Sartore
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A rusting fuel tank and a Christmas tree of valves mark Umiat Well Number 9 near the top of the ridge. From here, on a good day, you can see forever. In the distance the land rises in green plateaus and long benches all the way to the rugged Brooks Range to the southeast, while the broad valley of the Colville River opens like a gentle fold in the earth, slowly ascending on one bank to the 800-foot (340-meter) bluff known as Umiat Mountain. It's easy to forget that the military once left thousands of barrels of oil, diesel, DDT, and PCB to rot here. One morning, in bone-chilling rain, six peregrine falcons soared like stealth bombers along that bluff, hunting for the hapless gosling or rodent to feed their hungry chicks. The bluffs along the river provide some of the most important nesting areas in the Arctic for the species.
It's rugged, beautiful, wide-open country, essentially unchanged since woolly mammoths roamed these steppes. It's difficult to imagine it full of pipes, pump stations, and gravel roads. Yet somewhere beneath those foothills lie an estimated 100 million barrels of light, sweet crude—and an estimated 60 trillion cubic feet (1.7 trillion cubic meters) of natural gas, enough to satisfy the current demand in the U.S. for three years. The camp at Umiat was busy with oil-field geologists and other experts in advance of the next anticipated lease sale in NPRA and the intensive seismic work scheduled for the winter. And federal agencies are still trying to clean up the contaminated soils at Umiat, nearly 60 years after the Navy drilled it.
On a bitter September day with snow blowing horizontally off the Beaufort Sea, BP engineer Scott Digert pointed to an odd steel sculpture rising from the industrialized tundra of Prudhoe Bay. "That's the discovery well," he shouted to a small group of journalists over the howling wind—the last of a dozen exploratory wells drilled in the 1960s. The first 11 were dry holes, but on the last one ARCO and Humble Oil (now Exxon) hit pay dirt: the largest oil reservoir yet found on the continent. The historic well is now topped by a 15-foot-high (five meters) ARCO trademark, which Digert explained represents a spark inside a circle, but which looks more like giant crosshairs. Though the company merged with BP in 2000, Digert, a former ARCO man, couldn't help but beam. "Some of us former ARCO employees are pretty proud of that," he said.
Back in '68 Prudhoe was even more remote than Umiat. What started as one drill site covering 65 acres (26 hectares) has now sprawled across a thousand square miles (2,600 square kilometers) with 19 producing fields and 1,860 miles (3,000 kilometers) of pipeline, transforming a stretch of tundra the size of Yosemite into one of the largest industrial complexes on the globe. The original find was estimated at 9.6 billion barrels. Prudhoe has already produced 10 billion barrels, and BP and its partners hope to squeeze out several billion more, perhaps extending the field's life for another 50 years.
But the end of oil is in sight. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, or TAPS, which transported more than two million barrels a day in 1988, is down to 900,000 barrels a day and dropping 3 percent a year. Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski is clamoring to build a new pipeline to transport the slope's vast reservoir of natural gas to markets in the Midwest and to keep the state's coffers brimming, but so far that remains a pipe dream. Each day Prudhoe produces more gas than Canada burns in a day—some eight billion cubic feet—which is currently reinjected into the oil reservoir to keep the pressure up and the dwindling supply of oil flowing. If the gas pipeline gets approved, it will be one of the largest private construction projects the world has ever seen and will likely change the face of the slope forever.
For now, BP spokesman Daren Beaudo explained that his company is out of the exploration game on the North Slope. Instead BP is focusing on using the latest technology to squeeze every last drop out of the known formations at Prudhoe, including the estimated 23 billion barrels of heavy viscous oil that remains largely untapped.
At a new state-of-the-art well pad, with some 35 wells clustered together in small beige sheds, veteran operator Dan Hejl broke away from the hum of computers in the control room to open a small tap in one of the sheds out back. He poured about a liter of oil into a plastic container. It looked like a slightly thicker version of Guinness stout, with a gas station bouquet. "Smells like money," Hejl said.
It's hard not to be impressed by what hard work, technology, and an unseemly amount of money has carved out in one of the harshest environments on the globe. But the impacts are equally impressive. In March a corroded BP pipeline caused the largest oil spill in North Slope history—estimated at more than 200,000 gallons (760,000 liters)—one of hundreds of spills that occur there each year. Giant turbines scream day and night, pumping out more of some air pollutants than Washington, D.C. Perhaps most troubling, there are no plans to clean up the place when the oil and gas are gone. A 2003 report by the National Research Council concluded that because of exorbitant cost and lax oversight, most of the tundra will never be restored—making the stakes in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge all the higher.
"At this point, the decision to open ANWR has moved into the realm of politics," Beaudo said. "It needs to be decided by the American people. We're not going to try to influence that."
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