Alaska News

Closing coastal plain to oil, gas development a bad idea

Here's a lousy idea: Let's lock up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's 1.5 million-acre coastal plain as a wilderness so the evil oil industry can never search for the estimated 11 billion barrels of recoverable oil believed pooled there.

After all, the Energy Information Administration says this nation only imports 9.7 million barrels of crude oil a day, up more than a half-million barrels daily over the same period last year. About 5.9 million barrels come from our good friends at the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Our oil hunger is 57 percent fed by imports. During the Arab oil embargo it was 36 percent.

With all that, who really needs to find and produce new oil? That's easy. We do.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to update its 22-year-old ANWR management plan, perhaps even recommending the coastal plain be designated wilderness. That set off shock waves. Such a designation could lock up the plain forever.

At a Tuesday night hearing in Anchorage, 39 people spoke against a wilderness designation, 26 in favor. There is growing opposition to the idea across Alaska, where ANWR development generally is supported -- and where there already are more than 58 million acres of designated wilderness and more than 190 million protected acres. Gov. Sean Parnell and Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich already are on record against such a designation for the coastal plain.

ANWR's coastal plain is just a tiny dot on Alaska's topographical face, but it stirs strong emotions. It is either our best shot at another oil jackpot or a pristine, sensitive American Serengeti.

What evolved into ANWR was born in 1960, when President Dwight Eisenhower's Interior secretary, Fred Seaton, carved out 89 million acres of Alaska's northeast corner for the Arctic National Wildlife Range. Oil drilling was verboten.

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When Congress in 1980 created the refuge, it designated as wilderness 8 million acres of its 19.6 million acres -- nearly the size of Maine. Another 9.5 million acres received refuge status. It withheld any decision on the coastal plain's 1.5 million acres, but banned oil and gas development there pending study. Section 1002 of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act directed the Interior secretary to research the environmental consequences and report to Congress.

An environmental impact statement completed in 1987, and five years in the making, concluded there would be no significant adverse effects on wildlife if the plain was developed responsibly. Congress in 1995 voted to open the area, but then-President Bill Clinton vetoed the measure, and here we are today, running out of options.

The Gulf of Mexico well blowout has cast a pall on offshore development. Onshore, Alaska's onerous tax structure has discouraged North Slope investment, driving down production and exploration. Jobs and additional state revenue have dried up along with Alaska's contribution to the national energy picture. Throughput in the trans-Alaska oil pipeline is drying up at about 6 percent a year. The Energy Information Administration says it could dwindle to 270,000 barrels a day by 2030. Production is plunging like Sarah Palin's popularity, to about 677,000 barrels last month, or 13.5 percent of the nation's production. Its high was 25 percent.

Alaska and the nation need the oil and the thousands of jobs ANWR would create. The federal treasury needs the taxes and royalties one estimate put at $29 billion over 15 years.

But calls to drill in ANWR repeatedly are rejected. Caribou will suffer, opponents proclaim. Polar bears will have no place to den. Nesting birds will be harmed. The coastal plain would only produce enough oil for 200 days, they argue. Environmentalists might as well contend striped Arctic ice worms will go extinct. That would be just as truthful. More than three decades of oil exploration and production in the Arctic without an environmental catastrophe on land, or damage to wildlife, belies their charges.

There are a host of innovations that warrant drilling in ANWR. Extended reach, directional drilling can tap oil pockets eight miles away while requiring a smaller drilling pad footprint. Then, there are ice roads, 3-D seismic technology and more.

In a volatile world, we need energy security. The question is whether responsibly developing a tiny portion of ANWR's coastal plain could help move us in that direction until alternative energy sources can be found and developed.

Closing the coastal plain forever is not the answer.

Paul Jenkins is the editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet.

PAUL JENKINS

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Paul Jenkins

Paul Jenkins is a former Associated Press reporter, managing editor of the Anchorage Times, an editor of the Voice of the Times and former editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet.

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