Oil Spill Intensifies Debate on Drilling Peril to Caribou

The troubles faced by the fish and birds in Alaska’s Prince William Sound because of the March 24 oil spill have intensified a debate on the future of about 180,000 caribou that wander the tundra about 800 miles to the north.

That is where the oil industry wants to extend its search for oil--and where environmentalists have planted a stake in the ground. Both sides say that the issue has been catapulted to the top of the environmental agenda in Congress by the recent oil disaster.

A classic policy battle even before the accident off the port of Valdez, the argument is portrayed by the two sides in almost cosmic terms: the survival of North America’s last complete ecosystem versus the nation’s last best hope for another world-class oil field to protect the national security.

At issue is the coastal plain of Alaska National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Alaska, a strip of land 100 miles wide by 18 to 40 miles deep that lies between the Beaufort Sea and the northernmost foothills of Alaska’s Brooks Range. The coastal plain takes up 1.5 million acres of the 19-million-acre refuge.

Congress must approve any commercial activity in the refuge and one of three bills on the issue--opening the plain up for development--was approved 12 to 7 last month by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. It is sponsored by Sens. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), chairman of the committee, and the ranking minority member of the panel, Sen. James A. McClure (R-Ida.).

The oil industry’s supporters, including President Bush, insisted last week that it is illogical to link the tanker spill with the safety of oil drilling. Most of the nation’s crude oil arrives by tanker and that will not change regardless of what development takes place in Alaska.

If oil were found on the coastal plain, it probably would enter production in 10 years. With Prudhoe Bay production already entering its natural decline, the new oil would supplant it, prolonging rather than increasing the tanker traffic from Valdez.

“They’re not related,” declared Walter J. Hickel, the former Interior secretary and ex-governor of Alaska who has long advocated the development of the state’s rich resources. “The wildlife refuge is a drilling problem and Valdez is a tanker problem. But from a perception standpoint, I can well understand that it’s going to be a problem.”

Highlights Risks

Opponents see the oil spill as a powerful argument to sway undecided lawmakers because it highlights the risks of the oil system versus the advantages of energy conservation or the development of cleaner forms of energy.

Critics also said that the apparent snafus that both caused and followed the spill have seriously weakened the credibility of the oil industry, which has boasted until now of having operated in the Arctic for 20 years and produced 6 billion barrels of crude oil without environmental disaster.

“For days, everybody in the nation has been bombarded with these images from Valdez,” said John Katz, the head of the state of Alaska’s Washington office. “The oil spill is going to have a profound influence on decision-making in Washington.”

At a minimum, the spill could generate support for additional delays or for linkage of any congressional action opening up the refuge to such conservationist goals as tougher fuel economy standards for cars.

“This dramatic spill will finally get the attention of a lot of people who haven’t looked at it very hard until now,” said former Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.), an adviser to the Wilderness Society in Washington.

“We may very well have the votes, as a result of this, to at least refer it to the National Academy of Science for study.”

Raises Questions

Said an aide to Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), whose Interior subcommittee has jurisdiction over all three pending House bills on the refuge: “Nobody’s going to say: ‘I changed my mind because of the spill.’ But this raises a lot of questions about development. This is a major political event in addition to an ecological event.”

The refuge, established by Congress in two steps in 1960 and 1980, adjoins Canada’s Yukon Territory and embraces several peaks in the Brooks Range, a virtually sacred region to such conservationists as the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

Oilmen have restricted their exploration target to the coastal plain, a flat to gently rolling, treeless piece of landscape--”a flat, crummy place,” as an Atlantic Richfield executive unwisely described it a few years ago--said to overlie 26 major geologic structures.

The legislation that completed creation of the wildlife refuge in 1980 also ordered a separate study of the biology and the oil potential of the coastal plain. A consortium of oil companies produced an optimistic report that led the Ronald Reagan Administration to recommend in April, 1987, that the plain be opened to oil exploration and development.

The pro-development report by then-Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel has attracted almost as much debate as the coastal plain itself. Field biologists at Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service complained that the report was sanitized, understating the possibilities of environmental damage arising from oil development.

The 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. . . .”

200 Species Present

The plain has 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.

But the chief concern is the Porcupine caribou herd, the continent’s sixth-largest migratory herd of caribou, officially estimated at 180,000 animals. They travel a route back and forth from a winter site in interior Canada to the Wildlife Refuge for a 6- to 10-week period each summer.

Although another caribou herd appears to have prospered despite the huge oil field developments at Prudhoe Bay about 100 miles to the west, the Porcupine herd historically has used the coastal plain of the refuge as a calving ground.

Studies show that when the animals do not reach the plain to calve--which occurs if there is a late thaw, for instance--there is a significantly higher death rate among the offspring.

Protecting the normal calving ground has become a focus of the oil battle. Another bill before Congress--introduced by Rep. Walter B. Jones (D-N.C.), chairman of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee--would open most of the coastal plain but impose a 10-year moratorium on the calving ground itself for further study.

In one example of the hazy scientific parameters of the debate, the very existence of a particular calving ground within the refuge and its boundaries is disputed. The whole concept was excised from the Interior Department report. Most of the caribou have not even reached the plain to calve in the last two years because of a late snow melt, biologists say.

But David Klein, a wildlife biologist at the University of Alaska who has studied the Arctic for 30 years, says that the latest research on the Porcupine herd bolsters the calving ground theory by showing that the forage there is superior to that elsewhere. This helps explain the highly successful calving on the plain, he said.

The geological facts are also unclear, and will be unless exploration is permitted. Exploration itself would not disrupt the plain much, says a new report by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, but development would mean a “major industrial infrastructure” comparable to that at Prudhoe Bay, but more modern.

If there is oil at all, the Interior Department report said, it is likely to amount to about 3.2 billion barrels, which would make it the nation’s third-largest discovery after Prudhoe Bay and the East Texas field.

The report by the Office of Technology Assessment said that estimate is probably too low, although the oil industry repeatedly has been disappointed in the Arctic since the 1968 discovery of Prudhoe’s 9 billion barrels.

One exploratory well has been drilled by Chevron on part of the plain controlled by the native village of Kaktovik. Citing competitive reasons, Chevron recently won a court battle to keep results of the test well a secret.

Oil Consumption Jumps

If the oil spill casts the debate in a new light, so has the sharp decline in world oil prices of the last three years. It has helped cause a steep international jump in consumption, and in the United States has depressed oil production and driven the nation’s dependence on foreign oil back up to 1970s, pre-oil-shock levels.

The big oil companies have used this as ammunition in their campaign to win access to the wildlife refuge, triggering anew the old debate about whether the nation has an energy policy.

For instance, the Reagan Administration’s relaxation of auto fuel economy standards has already caused the nation to consume an extra 300 million barrels or so. As vice president, George Bush headed a deregulation task force that advocated doing away with fuel economy standards altogether.

If driving and car-purchasing habits went unchanged for as long as a new 3.2-billion-barrel oil field is likely to remain in production, the relaxation in fuel economy standards would effectively swallow up all the new oil.

Similar criticisms are leveled at the recent increases in highway speed limits, which have also boosted gasoline consumption. And the nation’s low taxes on gasoline--paltry compared to those levied in Europe and Japan--have helped enlarge the country’s appetite for oil.

“The good thing that might come out of this spill is if it reminds people that energy and the environment are related and if they start examining some of these issues,” said Jack Riggs, staff director of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on energy and power.

Alaskans Reap Bonanza

The fate of the federally owned wildlife refuge is not up to Alaskans, who have supported oil development and been rewarded with a financial bonanza over the last decade.

Alaska’s citizens, including its native groups, have seen billions of dollars in oil revenues used to extend better schools, roads, health care, communications and other hallmarks of modern life to the most remote sections of the rugged state. Every Alaskan even gets an annual lump-sum payment of several hundred dollars from the state’s oil-fed financial reserves.

But if they had a vote on the refuge today, state officials say, it would be a lot closer than it would have been before the spill.

“There’s really no relationship between the wildlife refuge and the question of whether we can move oil safely,” says Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska), who remains a staunch advocate of development. “But Alaskans feel betrayed. The state had signed off on the adequacy of the oil industry’s ability to avoid this kind of thing.”