Norton Tours Ground Zero in the Oil Exploration Battle: Arctic Refuge

Stepping into a numbing cloud of blowing snow and a wind chill factor of 70 below zero, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton on Saturday went to the heart of the nation’s biggest environmental battleground: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Touring Alaska’s North Slope with Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska) and two other senators, Norton reaffirmed the Bush administration’s commitment to oil drilling on the 1.5-million-acre coastal plain that is considered the crown jewel of the national wildlife refuge system.

“We have in this area the potential for the oil that can provide a significant percentage of the domestic oil for the United States. We also have wildlife that are the focus of interest all over the country,” Norton, wearing a white fur hat, told an Eskimo community group gathered at the edge of the refuge.

“It’s my hope that we can find a way to take care of the environment, take care of the wildlife and also go forward with development of the energy resources.”

Mary Matalin, representing Vice President Dick Cheney’s national task force on energy, said Alaska is a crucial link in assuring America’s future energy needs.

“Both the president and the vice president . . . are lovers of this land. They are conservationists; they both come from states that have protected their lands. They both love to hunt,” Matalin told community leaders.

The two senators who accompanied Murkowski--Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee; and Mark Dayton, a freshman Democrat from Minnesota--were noncommittal and said the journey was a fact-finding trip.

“I am trying to learn what I can about the situation here and the trade-offs that are involved and the opportunities that exist,” Bingaman said.

Three Republican senators--Charles Hagel of Nebraska, George Allen of Virginia and Wayne Allard of Colorado--bowed out of the journey for personal reasons.

Murkowski, who heads the energy committee, is shepherding national energy legislation through Congress, with a second hearing set for this week. Its centerpiece is authorization to open the coastal plain of the 19-million-acre refuge, well east of the existing oil fields at Prudhoe Bay, to exploration and drilling.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are anywhere from 6 billion to 16 billion barrels of oil that can be recovered from beneath the fertile tundra, though opponents argue that only about 3.2 billion barrels--enough to meet the nation’s energy needs for about six months--can be drawn out economically.

Conservation groups have been highly critical of Norton’s trip--her first to the North Slope, though she has worked as a resource lawyer in Alaska in the past--because they were provided no chance to argue the merits of preserving the area from oil development.

Opponents say drilling could disrupt the 129,000-strong caribou herd that often calves on the coastal plain in the summer, along with large numbers of polar bears, musk oxen and thousands of birds from all over the Western Hemisphere.

“This trip is as balanced as a Cuban election,” said Adam Kolton, Arctic campaign director for the Alaska Wilderness League. “They will wine and dine with the . . . pro-drilling interests but won’t meet with any of Alaska’s conservation, sporting or religious organizations that oppose drilling in the Arctic refuge.”

Several hundred protesters--one dressed as a pregnant caribou--gathered outside Norton’s meeting with business leaders Friday night in Fairbanks.

On Saturday, Norton visited a 24-year-old, 40-acre oil well complex in the aging Prudhoe Bay oil field, where 500 miles of roads cut through one of the biggest industrial complexes in the U.S. Oil industry officials say the Prudhoe and Kuparuk oil fields, still producing about 1 million barrels of oil a day, represent an old technology markedly different from the new, smaller, horizontally drilled wells that characterize the newest oil development on the North Slope.

“The footprint of this operation is much larger than anything you’re going to see today,” said Ronnie Chappell, spokesman for BP Alaska Inc., which is one of the main operators on the North Slope, along with Phillips Alaska.

At Alpine, one of the newest North Slope operations, Norton toured a new-technology field that is almost without permanent roads.

There, Phillips Alaska is draining a 40,000-acre oil field, with an estimated 429 million barrels of reserves, with just 97 acres of surface operations. Supplies are brought in over a 35-mile-long ice road operational from January through May.

“When you look at Alpine, you’re really looking at state of the art,” Phillips Alaska President Kevin Meyers told the delegation. “It would represent what we would be looking at in terms of future development, what it would be at [the refuge] . . . or anywhere else on the North Slope.”

The timing of Saturday’s trip was key. Though spring has arrived on the calendar, it is nowhere in sight in the Arctic Circle, where blowing snow, 30 mph winds and temperatures ranging from 25 to 70 degrees below zero kept Norton confined to a bus and a plane most of the day. The refuge could barely be glimpsed from frosted-over windowpanes, and what could be seen was flat, bare and white--a long way from the wildlife wonderland that erupts in June and July.

Murkowski’s aides say the timing was appropriate, as the bulk of oil exploration would be limited to the empty winter months, when ice roads can be constructed across the tundra that leave little trace in the spring.

In the Inupiat Eskimo village of Kaktovik, huddled on the edge of the coastal plain, community leaders urged Norton to open access to federal lands and their own Native Alaskan lands within the refuge to provide revenues for a village that, without oil, would live almost entirely on the fish, whales and animals around it.

“Some people call this the battle between Big Oil and the caribou. That simplifies it too much,” Kaktovik Mayor Lon Sonsalla said.

“The reason outside environmentalists call this place a pristine wilderness is that the people who live here have taken care of it,” Sonsalla said.

While the community has lived on the refuge for generations, he added, “we have a lot of schoolchildren who need meaningful jobs when they graduate”--jobs that can be assured if Native Alaskans can access their oil reserves below the coastal plain.

President Bush has said that drilling in the refuge will be a key component of his energy strategy, and Norton has signaled her intent to end the war between the federal government and Alaska’s Republican-dominated leadership over use of the federal lands that make up three-fourths of the state. Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat, also is a strong proponent of drilling in the Arctic refuge.

With Norton at his side, Murkowski was beaming through much of the day. The worse the weather, it seemed, the better he liked it. “It certainly seems like a place where ice roads would be appropriate,” Norton murmured as the senator took her to the commencement point of the 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline, which carries North Slope oil to Valdez in Prince William Sound for shipment.

To Kaktovik residents, Murkowski said the nation’s reliance on imported oil already is at 56% and steadily growing.