The Real Energy Crisis

The Interior Department has set up a new environmental confrontation with Congress that it seems certain to lose. The issue this time is oil and gas development on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. The 1.55 million acres in question should have been set aside as wilderness back in 1980 when Congress passed the Alaska Lands Act. That concession to development interests should be rectified now.

The 1980 law required the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service to report in five years on the area’s petroleum potential and environmental assets. Officials had five alternatives to present to Secretary Donald P. Hodel, ranging from preservation of the area as wilderness to all-out development. Other options included the drilling of exploration wells to determine if there was sufficient oil to justify commercial development.

The Interior officials chose the worst of the five--to lease the entire area now. The rationale is familiar to anyone who has followed Interior’s attempts to throw open the California coastline to offshore drilling: National security mandates the development of all the domestic supplies it can.

Interior would control operations to protect the environment. Even so, the report concludes: “Long-term losses in fish and wildlife resources, subsistance uses (by Alaska natives) and wilderness values would be the inevitable consequences of a long-term commitment to oil and gas development, production and transportation.”

By opting for full development, Interior seems to have guaranteed the defeat of its proposal, although Hodel has time to revise it before it goes to Congress in the spring for approval.

The nation needs the oil. But there is a basic flaw in the Administration’s zeal for drilling everywhere and anywhere. It has keyed the U.S. energy future to a no-win option. No matter how much the wildcatters find, domestic supplies cannot keep up with current levels of consumption. The nation would run out of oil, perhaps in the 21st Century.

But there is no policy for dealing with that inevitable event. There is no viable program of synthetic-petroleum production. There is no development of alternative fuels such as methanol that could provide an orderly transition to the future. When Congress produces energy-saving legislation, such as appliance efficiency standards, the President vetoes it. Mass-transit programs are opposed or discouraged. Conservation is a forgotten word in the temporary flush of cheap imported oil. Higher gasoline taxes and import tariffs are eschewed even though they would discourage imports and encourage domestic production.

Interior declares, on the basis of geological assumptions, that the Arctic refuge might contain 30 billion barrels of oil. That sounds like real energy security, for perhaps a decade. But read the fine print. At best, only 9.2 billion barrels are recoverable. The statistical chances are good that the field would yield only about 3 billion barrels. That is not security, but merely a brief postponement of the inevitable.

Interior officials warn that rampant oil development with no concern for the environment will occur if the oil is “locked up” until a national crisis occurs. But the present policy guarantees that the crisis will occur sooner, not later. The only path to true energy security is a balanced program that weans us from our imprudent diet of petroleum overconsumption. Arctic oil still might be needed. Or it might not.