Caribou Refuge : Wildlife or Oil? Debate Stirs Alaska

On a small bluff overlooking the Jago River near here, it smells as if someone sprinkled oil on the wildflowers. Geologist Michael Bradshaw, carrying a small pick, strides through the Arctic poppies and down the bluff to show why.

The pick easily passes through the crumbly surface of the bluff and breaks off gooey chunks of clay, which turns out to be the source of the unlikely aroma. On the same site where caribou give birth and snow geese spend the summer, petroleum is literally oozing out of the ground.

To say that this act of God is viewed differently by different people would be an understatement. It has triggered another of those monumental fights between environmentalists and the oil companies, presenting Congress with one of its hottest environmental issues in years.

See Immense Stakes

With more hyperbole than usual, the two sides describe the stakes as nothing less than the survival of the very last complete ecosystem in North America--or the very national security of these United States.

But the battle over part of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, which this month will attract as many touring congressmen as it has wolves (about 35), is almost as intriguing for its side issues.

The struggle aims a spotlight at the Reagan Administration’s seemingly contradictory energy policies and is becoming a de facto referendum on Big Oil’s environmental record at the huge Prudhoe Bay oil fields about 120 miles away. And while oil has the backing of Alaskan Native leaders, whose villages have come to rely on revenues from Alaska’s oil, the issue has alarmed some Indians to whom the caribou matters more than cash.

Both Sides Press Issue

As for the fact that the country is running out of oil, the unfortunate geological condition which underlies the whole debate, it is being used by both sides to press their case.

To Rose Lee, an Athabascan Indian in Arctic Village, population 130, which kills and eats perhaps 500 caribou each year, the finite nature of oil simply means it can’t be counted on like the animals. Whether the caribou would continue to pass Rose Lee’s way after oil fields were built 150 miles to the north of her cabin is one element in the dispute.

As caribou meat dries in the cache outside her log cabin, she talks of the fleeting nature of oil and the money it brings: “Money is only there for a second. The caribou will come year after year.”

And the environmental pitch is that the amount of oil here would only run the country for several months, not enough to justify carving up a wildlife-rich, generally pristine area, and it is time to get serious about post-oil sources of energy anyway.

But to geologists, the site is this country’s best remaining hope for a big oil discovery against the backdrop of long-term decline in domestic oil reserves. As such, it affords the best chance to stem the decline, limit our need for imported oil and improve the nation’s severe trade imbalance.

And among leaders of Native groups with a direct financial stake in oil development, the dwindling oil means dwindling public income. Royalties on the 5 billion barrels of oil produced from Prudhoe Bay have already pumped about $1 billion in capital improvements alone into the sparsely populated northernmost reaches of the state.

“Environmentalists don’t give you hospitals, roads, housing, water and sewer,” adds Eskimo Oliver Leavitt of Barrow, a vice president of the Arctic Slope Regional Corp., a private Native corporation. “We had 13-channel television before Anchorage did. Why? Not because of the environmentalists.”

Governor Plans Limits

Alaska Gov. Steve Cowper proposes to limit the oil development geographically. Plans are also being hatched to offer to divert some oil royalties for wildlife uses as a way to divide the critics. But neither side is publicly talking compromise.

The oil industry will not undertake costly exploration unless it is assured the right to get at the oil and sell it, and industry leaders--supported by the Interior Department--point to their apparently successful record at Prudhoe Bay to argue that Alaska can have both oil wells and wildlife. The environmentalists, contending that they have already lost most of the coastline to exploitation, hope to stall the issue in the hopes that the next occupant of the White House will be friendlier to their cause.

“Where’s the compromise? It’s the type of an issue where you don’t think compromise. You drive a stake in the sand and say, ‘You don’t cross the Canning River,’ ” declares Susan Alexander, the head of the Alaska office of the Wilderness Society.

The Canning River marks the western edge of the refuge’s coastal plain, to which the oil companies have limited their request to explore.

Covers 1.5 Million Acres

It is a flat to gently rolling, treeless strip of land covering about 1.5 million acres on the state’s north coast. About 100 miles wide and 18 to 40 miles deep, it lies between the Beaufort Sea and the northern foothills of the Brooks mountain range.

The plain takes up about 8% of what is the nation’s largest wildlife refuge, a South Carolina-sized area established in two steps by Congress in 1960 and 1980. The refuge covers 19 million acres, abutting Canada’s Yukon Territory and extending about 150 miles south to embrace several rugged peaks in the Brooks Range, one-time haunt of such well-known conservationists as Robert Marshall and the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

About 8 million acres of the refuge were designated a wilderness in 1980, meaning there can be no commercial activity.

In the same 1980 legislation which protected most of the refuge--the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act--Congress ordered a study of the biology and the oil potential of the coastal plain. The optimistic results of geological field work since conducted by a consortium of about 20 oil companies led Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel to recommend in April that Congress open the entire plain to oil exploration and full-scale development.

26 Key Geological Finds

Just a short helicopter ride east of Prudhoe Bay, the nation’s biggest oil field, the plain is said to contain 26 major geological structures. Oil has naturally seeped to the tundra surface in at least six places, giving off a heavy perfume to geologists like Conoco’s Bradshaw.

“The coastal plain is a virtual department store of possibilities for hydrocarbons,” he says.

The plain is scenically the least interesting part of the wildlife refuge, and its physical appearance in contrast to the country immediately south of it has become an issue. Yosemite it isn’t. But oilmen complain that some television footage has fibbed, portraying prettier parts of the wildlife refuge where the industry doesn’t propose to drill.

“I’ve never run into an environmental story that’s been as dishonest as this one,” complains George Keller, chairman of Chevron and president of the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s principal trade group.

The former head of Atlantic Richfield’s Alaska operations, Harold Heinze, once described the coastal plain as a “flat, crummy place.” About 200 miles above the Arctic Circle and inaccessible by road, it is frozen solid for about eight months a year. The mean summertime temperature is 40 degrees.

One Big Sacred Place

But to environmentalists, scenery is not the point, and Heinze’s description is one of those memorable examples of corporate insensitivity to the wilds. The Washington-based Wilderness Society, which has spearheaded efforts to protect this corner of Alaska for 30 years, makes no distinction between the plain and the more spectacular country to the south. Ecologically speaking, it is all one big sacred place.

The plain itself has, indeed, more personality and more wildlife than the extraordinarily bleak landscape at Prudhoe Bay. The count: about 200 species of wildlife and fish, among them 500 musk oxen, 100 brown bears, a few dozen wolves, 325,000 geese and 300,000 other wildfowl, 62 marine species and, for brief periods in the summer, more than 100,000 caribou.

A much-criticized Interior report to Congress tended to minimize the likely effects of oil development on the region, angering some wildlife biologists at both the state and federal levels. Hodel’s report conceded that the coastal plain has “outstanding Arctic habitats which support fish and wildlife species of national and international significance.”

But it concluded: “The public interest demands that the area be made available for oil and gas exploration and development, conducted in an orderly and sensitive manner to avoid unnecessary adverse effects on the environment.”

Toned-Down Version

Hodel’s recommendation was a toned-down version of a report last November by Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service. Both documents have been criticized as sketchy and thinly documented by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Congressional Research Service.

“Potential underestimation of impacts” of oil development on the coastal plain “occurs throughout” the final report, complained Robie G. Russell, Seattle regional administrator of the EPA. The likely impact of various activities on the environment was reduced in the final report from “major” to “moderate” and from “moderate” to “minor” without explanation, Russell said.

Most of the concern has focused on the Porcupine caribou herd, officially estimated at 180,000 animals, much of which makes its way from Canadian territory through the mountain passes of the Brooks Range to visit the coastal plain for six to 10 weeks each summer. The plain is considered the herd’s favorite area to calve, although the number varies annually. About two-thirds of the herd calved elsewhere this year.

The main worry is whether the structures and people that would accompany oil development on the coastal plain would drive the pregnant cows away from the region to areas farther south or east, where calving has been less successful in the past. Each side has qualified wildlife biologists supporting its case.

Sharp Words Exchanged

Canadian concerns about the effects on the international caribou herd of U.S. oil drilling have prompted sharp words between the two governments.

The caribou debate has inspired emotionalism, furious back-pedaling, poor math and soaring flights of logic.

A Sierra Club advertisement soliciting money to fight oil in the wildlife refuge characterizes Arctic caribou as an “endangered species,” though each of the great migratory herds is increasing dramatically in size these days. There are about 2.2 million caribou in Alaska and Canada. The Porcupine herd, at 180,000 to 200,000, is the continent’s sixth largest.

A pro-oil commentator, finding it ironic that American troops protect the shipment of oil past Iran’s missiles and through the Persian Gulf to Japan while an environmental fight rages here, grumbles that the Iranians could protect their Silkworm missile sites by surrounding them with caribou.

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who in 1977 opposed the routing of a natural gas pipeline across the coastal plain as the equivalent of running “a razor blade across the Mona Lisa,” has apparently had his artistic sensibilities lowered: he now supports oil development in the same place.

And while an impassioned environmentalist writes in Wilderness magazine that the caribou needs another oil field “about as much as it needs a bullet hole through the back of its neck,” his colleagues on the environmental front talk of saving the caribou for the feeding of the Natives who put bullet holes in upwards of 1,000 of the Porcupine herd each year.

Herds Still Flourish

If Prudhoe Bay is any indication, many caribou like oil fields. A smaller group called the Central Arctic herd, whose normal territory includes the oil fields, has more than tripled in size, to about 16,000, since the oil industry arrived in the early 1970s. The growth rate is comparable to that of herds which have not encountered oil fields.

The animals wander casually throughout the oil fields, often finding relief from tundra mosquitoes on the man-made gravel platforms on which virtually all the oil facilities are built for tundra protection. From a taxiing jetliner, reclining caribou cows and calves are visible within 30 yards of the runway.

Thus the heart of the government’s argument, virtually indistinguishable from that of the oil industry, is that oil and the environment can live side by side for the 40 or 50 years it takes to deplete the typical oil field. Interior says the proper safeguards can prevent permanent damage.

Some of the staunchest environmentalists in Congress say that the tightly regulated oil development on Alaska’s North Slope has turned out better than they expected. The sponsor of legislation to make the coastal plain a wilderness area, Rep. Morris K. Udall (D-Ariz.), said recently: “We’ve had 15 years or so with Prudhoe and we came out pretty good. The people who talked about ecological disaster have been proven wrong.”

80-Mile Coastal Stretch

A maze of above-ground pipelines crisscrosses three producing oil fields--called Prudhoe, Kuparuk and Lisburne--spanning an 80-mile stretch of the coastline. Nearly 1,000 oil wells, recognizable as 30 to 40 small huts clumped on each of dozens of man-made gravel platforms, are producing about 2 million barrels of oil daily, the same as Iraq. About 6,000 people work on the North Slope to operate the oil wells, three large natural gas processing plants, a refinery, an airport, half a dozen hotels, a power plant and dozens of other facilities.

The greatest fear--a massive oil spill--has not materialized. But critics note that there have been more than 1,000 small ones, which an oilman calls “the price of doing business.” Most have been confined to the gravel platforms. Environmentalists also say there has been air and water pollution, and that it could be decades before the full impact is known. Udall says: “I think experience isn’t all that conclusive yet.”

The coastal plain offers a far smaller area for a much larger herd, and there are wildlife biologists in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game who argue that there is too much uncertainty to allow the oil industry to proceed.

“There’s a lot of stuff we don’t know about this particular herd,” one of the biologists says. “And caribou . . . is not the only wildlife. There are other species that interact with the caribou. . . . There’s a chain of life going on that we don’t fully understand.”

Proceeding With Caution

Ken Whitten, a wildlife biologist for the state, says: “Yes, the population has increased at Prudhoe Bay. But we interpret that with caution. We as state biologists certainly aren’t ready to say, ‘Nothing happened at Prudhoe, therefore nothing will happen at the refuge.’ ”

Cowper, his state’s economy reeling from last year’s collapse in oil prices and facing the inevitable depletion of the Prudhoe Bay oil reservoir, has proposed oil exploration and development everywhere on the plain except the so-called “core calving area”--a place whose existence was excised from Interior’s final report on the matter.

About 242,000 acres in size, it is a part of the coastal plain originally defined by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as the single most likely place for the caribou to calve. An official at Standard Oil says there is little historical evidence of any one favorite area and that the industry convinced Interior accordingly. Interior officials confirm this.

Cowper’s compromise is, according to an aide, an effort to find a “responsible . . . middle ground” for a constituency with a huge stake in oil development. The state stands to collect 90% of the bonuses and royalties on oil produced on the federal land. Today, oil accounts for a like 90% of state revenue.

Some See Merit in Idea

The hard-liners on both sides say that Cowper is trying to be all things to all people. But some private citizens, such as trapper Richard Carroll of Fort Yukon, a village of 600 on the Yukon River, see merit in the idea.

An Athabascan Indian who traps in the wildlife refuge five months a year, Carroll paused to visit recently outside his home amid scattered moose racks, bear and wolf skulls, a drying caribou hide and a huge, simmering pot of salmon stew he was preparing for his 13-dog team of huskies. He knows the issue.

“I’m all for Cowper’s deal,” Carroll said. “Let’s study it so we know what we’re getting into. Nobody knows how the caribou will react. Prudhoe Bay is no calving ground.”

Despite all the favorable signs, just how much oil lies beneath the surface is unknown. Oilmen have been disappointed repeatedly in the Arctic since the Prudhoe-area discoveries nearly 20 years ago. Unless exploration turns up at least 1 billion recoverable barrels, it probably would not be worth the cost of developing, Chevron’s Keller says.

The Interior Department says there is a 19% chance of finding recoverable oil on the plain, good odds by the crap-shooting standards of oil exploration in Alaska, where about 2% of all exploratory wells have found economically significant amounts of oil. If there is oil, it could be anywhere from 600 million barrels to 9.2 billion barrels, while the mean estimate is 3.2 billion barrels, Interior says.

Possibly Third-Largest Find

A field that yields 3.2 billion barrels would be about one-third the size of the Prudhoe field, which is now supplying about 20% of the nation’s domestically produced oil. It would be the third-largest discovery in U.S. history, after Prudhoe in the 1960s and East Texas in the early 1900s.

Privately, company geologists like to hint that all the public estimates are deliberately conservative and that there could be a whopper of an oil field there. But take your pick: the average estimate of the amount of oil in place by the state of Alaska’s own geologists is only about half that of the Interior Department’s best guess.

Though most geologists agree strongly that it is a potentially rich area, one senior government geologist with long Arctic experience is skeptical and says that the seismic data is of poor quality. He privately argues that if the oil companies are allowed to move in individually, the competition will spur them to drill three times as many exploratory wells as are needed to find oil--and do three times the damage.

“The public interest would be better served if the industry formed a consortium and went in and drilled six holes to find out what’s there,” the geologist said. “At Prudhoe, there were a lot of holes drilled that didn’t need to be drilled.”

Activity Is Under Way

One exploratory well has already been drilled by Chevron and British Petroleum on a small piece of the coastal plain owned communally by the whaling village of Kaktovik, and the results are a closely held secret. The well was drilled in winter on a timber drilling surface, employing an ice airfield and ice road. All equipment has been removed, leaving a 5-acre muddy field.

Environmental groups point out that 3.2 billion barrels would only supply this country’s oil needs for about 200 days, although the oil could not be produced that fast. It would be fed into the existing 800-mile pipeline running south through the center of Alaska and might last for 25 years, eventually accounting for perhaps 4% of the nation’s supply and 8% of domestic production.

Would that be worth it?

There is little doubt among independent energy economists that the nation is heading for trouble. The decline of oil prices has sharply cut oil exploration and weakened thousands of small U.S. oil producers. At best, economists agree, the United States can only hope to slow the decline of production from its largely depleted oil reservoirs.

With Middle East nations holding the bulk of the world’s remaining cheap oil and production capacity, there are serious implications for prices and supplies.

Charges of Oil Waste

But the Reagan Administration, sometimes abetted by Congress, has left itself open to charges that the nation has no energy policy and is wasting more oil than is likely to be found on the coastal plain of Alaska’s wildlife refuge.

The Department of Transportation just threw away the equivalent of 190 million barrels of crude with its two-year rollback of auto fuel economy standards to 26 miles per gallon compared to the previous goal of 27.5, according to government estimates. If the 26 miles per gallon figure remained in force for as long as a new 3.2-billion-barrel oil field is likely to be in production, the lower mileage standard would effectively swallow up all the new oil.

And if the recent action by Congress in lifting the 55-m.p.h. speed limit led to 65-m.p.h. speed limits on all applicable highways, it would cost another 600 million barrels of crude over 25 years. An oil field that size would be classified as “supergiant.”

Lobbyists Remain Silent

Though the oil industry warns of threats to energy security and supports the idea of energy conservation, its vast lobbying arm in Washington was silent on the auto and speed limit issues, officials at the American Petroleum Institute concede. For oilmen, the best solution is obviously to find more oil and sell it.

But some question whether the government should look at it the same way.

“One is entitled to wonder about this Administration’s concern over energy security,” says Gaylord Nelson, the former senator from Wisconsin who now works for the Wilderness Society. “A policy that continues primary emphasis on digging up a little more fragile land for a little more oil is not a substitute for a sound, long-range energy program and, in fact, will perpetuate our increasing dependence on foreign oil.”