Alaska’s Delicate Arctic Awaits New Push for Crude

This cold plain has always been a land of mirage. A ground squirrel, spied across the greening tundra, becomes a grizzly. The Brooks Range flips over on its back, and the mountains become mesas. Even the sun, in the perpetual twilight of summer, is trapped in the sky.

This is much of what we know of the end of the Earth. To the east is Arco Alaska Inc.’s drilling rig 245, the last in a line of steel towers plumbing the western edge of the Kuparuk oil field. To the north is the ragged Arctic ice field. This landscape of fractured tundra and icy lakes, Alaska’s 23.4-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve, is the largest expanse of undeveloped public land in America.

It also may have 5.5 billion barrels of oil buried in its permafrost belly. A year after conservationists beat back attempts to begin drilling in the nearby Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a showdown is looming in this larger reserve--a contest that the oil companies appear likely to win.

Drilling on the Arctic refuge was sidelined with the threat of a presidential veto. Now, bowing to pressure from Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles, the Clinton administration has ordered expedited studies on these lands to the west, a schedule that could launch exploratory drilling on the first 4.6 million acres as early as next year.

At a time when the trans-Alaska pipeline and the continent’s largest oil field at Prudhoe Bay was supposed to have been tapped out, a stunning array of North Slope finds--fueled by new technology and modern oil economics--means a production field that has been in decline since the late 1980s will open the taps even wider over the next several years, a third above original forecasts.

The development of three-dimensional seismic equipment, the extension of oil infrastructure to the outer boundaries of Prudhoe Bay and the economic ability to exploit smaller fields have led to new finds all over the North Slope.

But none has proved more portentous than Arco’s announcement last fall that it had found oil--probably 365 million barrels of it--on its Alpine exploration site out near the border of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

Rich Habitat for Migrating Waterfowl

Alpine, the first wildcat find on the North Slope since 1990 and the first so far west of Prudhoe, on lands largely scoped out and forgotten in the 1980s, will mean $1 billion in new taxes and royalties for Alaska and the small Eskimo villages of the North Slope.

More importantly, the Alpine discovery has placed the National Petroleum Reserve in the headlights of a surge of interest in North Slope oil potential.

And a region that is one of the richest habitats on Earth for tens of thousands of migrating waterfowl and the summer range of the world’s largest caribou herd could well be the place where the U.S. government launches its first onshore oil leasing program on the North Slope since the 1980s.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who has vowed to walk “every inch” of the reserve during a tour this week, has set an October deadline for environmental studies.

“In 1976, Congress spoke on what this is, and it’s a national petroleum reserve. The good thing is that . . . Congress recognized important surface values,” said Deborah Williams, Babbitt’s special assistant for Alaska. “The goal of the planning process is to determine if and where leasing is appropriate and additional surface protections are appropriate.”

Conservationists are gearing up for what could be one of the biggest environmental battles of the coming year. They fear the speedy review and planning process raises the possibility of an unknown cumulative toll from what is already 130 miles of oil fields on the region’s abundant wildlife--and threatens one of the last great snowy wildernesses.

“I’ve traveled the heart of this area . . . on a snowmobile. I was superintendent of the Gates of the Arctic National Park for seven years. So I’ve got a fairly good feeling for what a magnificent chunk of land it really is,” said Roger Siglin of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, which will fight a lease sale.

“I’ve always likened it to what it would’ve been like 100 years ago if you could’ve come out of the Rocky Mountains onto the plains of eastern Wyoming and just have this vast expanse below you. . . . You can’t have oil development and preserve wild country. You can’t even preserve the illusion of wild country.”

Ronnie Chappell, Arco Alaska’s spokesman, looks at the same landscape and doesn’t see wild country. He sees a petroleum reserve that has been explored several times since the Navy acquired it in 1923 to fuel its next war. He sees a field that every day coughs up enough natural gas to supply half of U.S. consumption--the promise of new domestic petroleum reserves in a country whose oil production is down 25% in the last decade--and that has yet to find a better way to power a car.

“I think people want it done right. We can’t develop fields and keep wilderness. But we can develop to the standard that most people have in mind, which is to leave most of the land untouched, without significant impact to the land,” Chappell says.

“Still, I think [an Arctic oil field] is an issue that’s off most people’s radar screens. My guess is that most Americans could care less whether a flat, remote place that they’ll never see has a pipeline running across it.”

Seemingly Barren, Teeming With Life

At first look, there is very little here. It is as flat and lonely and chilly a place as you could imagine. But the landscape, with time, begins to mesmerize. The gray-green tundra, with barely 2 months a year to spring up out of the snow, sprouts wildflowers of purple and white. Sage struggles up through ripples of sand. Dinosaur bones and ancient fossils litter the flood plain of a river whose bluffs date back 136 million years.

Ponds and lakes plumb down into leafy pools of purple and green and burnt orange. Beginning in June and stretching through the rest of the summer, the reserve is home to the highest density of breeding peregrine, gyrfalcon and rough-legged hawks in the world, and a huge population of nesting migratory birds.

Ted Swem, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, has counted and tagged raptors along the Colville River for decades. He picks his way up the high bluffs and, with a practiced eye, points to the warm eggs of a peregrine, nestled precariously on a grassy outcropping, while the falcon shrieks and swoops from overhead.

That these birds are here at all is a small miracle: They winter in places like Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Florida and south Texas. One peregrine that Swem banded upriver in 1987 was found the next winter on a bank building in Long Beach, he says, “hanging out and eating starlings.”

Even in summer the young raptors chirp to a tenuous life along these bluffs: Swem expects to band 80 baby peregrines this trip; by next summer, 70% will be dead.

Swem worries not so much about oil operations in the petroleum reserve, which likely would be well away from these bluffs. The problem, he says, is that gravel for the drilling pads and roads would have to be dug up from along these banks--there’s nowhere else to find it. Moreover, roads built to access the production zones will open the way for dozens of recreational boaters, who otherwise would never find their way to a river so remote.

“My personal views about what ought to be done with the river pertain more to a wilderness ethic, and aesthetic reasons to treat a major river corridor different than the surrounding landscape,” Swem says. “This is the biggest river in the U.S. Arctic. . . . Because it’s a migration corridor, because it’s so anomalous to the surrounding landscape, because it is unearthing so many fossils . . . it warrants exclusion from certain activities.”

A few miles from the Colville lies the crown jewel of the reserve: Teshekpuk Lake--a huge sinkhole in the tundra, 36 square miles of icy water, surrounded by smaller lakes and ponds--where 22% of the world’s population of Pacific black brant feed and molt.

“It’s kind of a mystery why they go there,” said Philip Martin, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who is coordinating bird studies for the oil leasing review. Nesting birds don’t go to Teshekpuk. Many of them fly up from Baja California and head to the delta of the Yukon and Kushkokwim rivers, about 500 miles away, to hatch their eggs. Those that don’t breed, or those whose eggs fail, take wing and head for Teshekpuk Lake to molt.

Windy, wide and open, there is no other goose molting area like it in North America. At least three species of geese and several ducks also favor the lake in large numbers during late June and July. During those crucial weeks, a small lake near Teshekpuk can have 5,000 geese on it. There are hundreds of lakes.

Eskimo Village Along the River

No one is more familiar with the bluffs of the Colville and the interior lakes of the petroleum reserve than the Eskimos at Nuiqsut, the Inupiat village along the river.

It was the Inupiat who named Teshekpuk--the “biggest lake.” Its geese, the caribou that stride the tundra and an annual allotment of bowhead whales taken from the Beaufort Sea represent much of the livelihood for this collection of prefab houses, a school, store and several fishing camps.

Much of that will change when Alpine starts producing; half the land it sits on belongs to Nuiqsut, and the 450 residents of the village--through their Kuukpik Corp.--will get a share of royalties from whatever oil comes out of the ground. If oil is found in the National Petroleum Reserve, that’s a whole new story. “I’ll be wearing a tie to work every day,” jokes Thomas Napageak, a whaling captain, tribal council president and senior official of the Kuukpik Corp.

Then, the smile fades. “When you’re talking about NPR-A, you don’t see green pastures growing beans, growing lettuce, growing corn. As you boated downriver, I’m pretty sure you didn’t see a pasture covered with cattle fattening themselves for slaughter,” he said.

“What we live on are caribou: sensitive animals, musk oxen and moose, unspoiled. The tundra in two more months, it will be bearing berries just for us to go out and pick them. This is NPR-A. Prudhoe was such a land--once. Now NPR-A’s coming up next,” he said.

Napageak worries a lot more than most of his compatriots: A lot of the village is looking forward to a natural gas line from Alpine that will replace the old diesel generator. And then, there’s the money.

“The mandate from this community was just, we don’t want another Prudhoe Bay here,” says Lanston Chinn, general manager of the Kuukpik Corp., who is heading up the Nuiqsut negotiating team. “That’s not going to happen. The economics of the development situation don’t lend themselves to that kind of thing. The situation is all different nowadays. Oil companies are trying to behave like normal companies.”

Nonstop Drilling at Kuparuk Station

The thwap and thwump of the drill boring through the tundra at Kuparuk station 245 splits the Arctic stillness 24 hours a day. Its blue steel rising up five stories high, the Parker Drilling Co. rig is the only mobile drilling rig in the world on a track system: It bores a hole in the tundra every eight days, then moves on tracks designed for the space shuttle over a few dozen yards and drills again.

Unlike the widely spaced wells of Prudhoe Bay, rig 245 will bore 32 holes in a single drilling pad, fanning out through new slant drilling techniques to drain nine square miles of tundra. Instead of leaving cuttings to gather in open reserve ponds, the rig grinds up the drilling muds and reinjects them back into the earth. There are no wastes. There are no distant processing centers, because oil, water and gas are separated on site.

The story of oil on the North Slope begins at Milepost Zero of the pipeline at Prudhoe Bay, moves on to Kuparuk, and finally out to the first exploration wells at Alpine. Each succeeding find has brought with it the benefits of new drilling techniques and environmental lessons, lessening the footprint on the land with each well plunged into the tundra.

Prudhoe Bay looks like an industrial site: production operations cover 5,500 acres of tundra, with typical drilling sites averaging 50 to 65 acres each. Kuparuk covers only 1,800 acres of gravel for an oil field the same size as Prudhoe. Drill sites average five to eight acres apiece, and are much more widely spaced. Roads are fewer; pipelines are elevated for better caribou passage.

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For Alpine, Arco is designing a drilling pad that should cover no more than 3.5 acres. In an unprecedented move, there will be no gravel road at all out to the drilling site, a remote location 34 miles west of Kuparuk. It will be served instead by an airstrip, an ice road during the winter and a three-mile road linking what will be only two drilling pads directly at the site. The pads will be of tundra-protecting ice; the gravel footprint is 100 acres--virtually unprecedented for a 365-million-barrel oil field.

Pipelines will be routed below the river. Waste will be composted on site. Traffic will be controlled to minimize disruption of caribou and nesting birds. A panel of native Eskimos will oversee the project’s impacts on surrounding wildlife vital to subsistence hunting.

“Alpine is a prototype for what might be done over at NPR-A: the way you collect data, the way you analyze it, how you make judgments about what should or should not be done in a planning area,” said Michael R. Joyce, Arco Alaska’s senior biologist.

Arco doesn’t even try anymore to call Prudhoe Bay a complete environmental success story. Its facilities are too dense, and its pipelines too low, to make ideal conditions for calving caribou.

State and federal biologists say the caribou have tended to avoid the heavily traveled roads, and they have documented what may be a decline in productivity among the central herd nearest Prudhoe. Nonetheless, there are thousands more caribou at Prudhoe than there were when the oil field started up, as caribou numbers have risen dramatically across the Arctic plain. Several species of migratory birds, especially tundra swans, also have fared well. Caribou and nesting birds can be seen throughout the oil fields at Prudhoe and Kuparuk, sometimes next to pipelines and roads.

As drilling moves farther west, possibly into the NPR-A, Joyce is ready to try a new barrage of techniques to guard wildlife. He talks about hiring a “caribou cop” to halt traffic on roads when caribou are trying to cross. Arco, he said, is even willing to consider suspending operations during critical midsummer nesting and molting cycles.

“We think with the right technology and the right conditions attached to permits, we can go anywhere,” Joyce said. “We just want access. You can tweak your techniques to any kind of critters.”

Arco’s seeming amiability shades the fact that a confrontation is looming. Conservation groups will demand removal of key areas from any leasing plans: Teshekpuk Lake and the Colville River corridor among them. ARCO, for all its willingness to mitigate, will brook no exclusions. Much of the oil to be found in the reserve, it is thought, resides underneath Teshekpuk.

“Eliminating that area gets us to the same condition we were in in the mid-’80s [during the government’s last lease sale], and nobody came to the party because there weren’t any prizes being offered,” Joyce said. “We think there are ways to design impacts to allow the development to occur, and still protect the resource.”