Anchorage Daily News

Along with a surging interest in fuel-efficient automobiles and biking to work, the legend of Alaska's Gull Island, a speck of land four miles or so offshore the North Slope in the middle of Prudhoe Bay, seems to have an uncanny ability to appear when the United States is facing soaring oil and gasoline prices.

Click to enlarge

Story tools

Comments

E-mail a friend

Print

Share on Facebook

Digg this

Seed Newsvine

Send link via AIM

Follow on Twitter

Font size : A | A | A

Back in 1981 when crude oil prices hit unimaginable highs above $30 per barrel, a letter from U.S. Rep. Bob Stump of Arizona popped into the mail bag of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in Anchorage.

"I have been contacted by several constituents concerning the recent allegations of a massive oil find off the North Slope on Gull Island. Those allegations range from a business cover-up to a giant federal conspiracy to perpetuate our energy crisis," Stump said. "I would appreciate any information that you can offer me that will aid with my correspondence with these constituents."

Some of Stump's constituents had presumably been reading a book called "The Energy Non-Crisis," written by sometime Baptist missionary Lindsey Williams and published in 1980. Williams' book included a description of the Gull Island field.

And, as oil prices started climbing in 2006, this time past $60 per barrel, Williams told a meeting of the Midwest Concerned Citizens group in Kansas City about how the fabulous Gull Island field could supply the United States with oil for 200 years. Gasoline prices could drop to just $1.50 per gallon if only the U.S. government and the oil companies were to open the spigots on the vast, undisclosed North Slope oil reserves, he said.

NORTH SLOPE CHAPLAIN

Williams said that in the 1970s Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. had given him a position as chaplain for people building the northern section of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline and working at the Prudhoe Bay camp. He said that Alyeska became so pleased with his success in counseling workers that they gave him executive privileges on the Slope, enabling him to attend board meetings held by company executives.

Williams said that in 1976 he stumbled across the discovery of a vast oil field penetrated by an exploration well drilled on Gull Island by Arco. He said that at the time of the discovery he had attended the management meeting in Arco's North Slope base camp, in which the "top eight oil company men of the world" had confirmed the find. But Arco refused to make public the Gull Island discovery and the field has remained a closely guarded secret ever since, Williams said.

Williams outlined the field in a second edition of the "The Energy Non-Crisis." The Gull Island field has a 1,200-foot thick pay zone and an area four times the size of the giant Prudhoe Bay field, he said. He said that three wells drilled from Gull Island had encountered the field, as did a well at East Dock. All wells drilled in an area extending 40 miles to the east of Gull Island had struck oil, thus demonstrating the huge areal extent of the field, he said.

And now, with oil prices moving through $130 per barrel, a flood of Internet chat has appeared on the subject of the supposed government and oil industry Gull Island secret. A recent Google search for "Gull Island" resulted in multiple pages of hits. Although some Web sites question Williams' claims, many seem to view the claims as evidence of government manipulation of the price of oil and a cover-up of the real status of world oil reserves.

"The public needs to demand the opening of the Gull Island oil field," appears as a call in some sites.

THREE WELLS

So what are the facts?

Three wells were drilled from Gull Island. The drilling results were initially closely held, but now the well data are public.

The first two wells were drilled in 1976 and 1977.

In a response to Stump's 1981 letter, Alaska Oil and Gas Commissioner Harry Kugler said Gull Island No. 1 well tested 1,144 barrels of oil per day from one underground reservoir, while the Gull Island No. 2 well tested 2,971 barrels of oil per day from other.

"We do not believe the evidence from these two wells indicates a massive new oil find," Kugler said. More wells would need to be drilled before deciding if it made sense to develop the reservoirs, he said. The third well was drilled in 1992.

Geologist Peter Barker was among those monitoring and interpreting Gull Island No. 1 as it was drilled in 1976. The objective was to test a deep structure north of the huge Prudhoe Bay field, the first North Slope field developed, Barker said recently.

"There was an (oil and gas) trap there, but there wasn't an economic quantity of oil," he said.

Ken Bird, of the U.S. Geological Survey and an expert on North Slope geology, recently provided some perspective on the Gull Island drilling.

Since 1980 at least four oil pools, the West Beach, Niakuk, Point McIntyre and North Prudhoe pools, as well as Prudhoe Bay satellites, have been developed in the area immediately around the Gull Island wells, Bird said. The four pools in the immediate Gull Island area are in production: According to Alaska's Division of Oil and Gas 2007 annual report, Point McIntyre had a cumulative production of 396 million barrels of oil at the end of 2006, with 164 million barrels of remaining reserves. The other three pools are much smaller than Point McIntyre. That compares with Prudhoe Bay's 11.4 billion barrels of oil already produced and Kuparuk River field's 2.1 billion barrels.

"Both the geologic evidence and the small area not yet developed into oil fields around the Gull Island wells preclude the possibility of a giant oil accumulation," Bird said.

But the Gull Island legend persists. And to cap it all, used versions of Williams' book "The Non-Energy Crisis" have appeared on Amazon.com as collector's items -- on July 7 three copies were listed with prices ranging from $1,299 to $1,499.

Maybe there's money to be made from Gull Island after all.

ADVERTISEMENT