CAPE SIMPSON, North Slope Borough — The federal government is fixing an environmental mess it left decades ago in the nation's largest oil reserve, removing rusting relics from an early era of exploration and providing a small counterweight of new jobs to the huge cutbacks on the North Slope oil patch.
The progress was highlighted Tuesday with a ceremonial plugging of a decades-old well in the giant National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The remote site 50 miles southeast of Barrow is accessible by ski plane.
Neil Kornze, director of the Bureau of Land Management, poured a bucket of cement mix into an 8-inch-wide pipe, helping plug a well drilled in 1951 near the frozen U.S. Arctic Ocean.
Standing in a pit that had been chewed open by an excavator hours before, Kornze capped the well with a metal identification plate in case it's ever unearthed again.
Around him, walls of ice glistened with oil that oozed like caramel syrup down a snow cone.
Those natural oil seeps and others at Cape Simpson — known to "white men since the late 1800s," according to an old federal study of the Alaska Native region — helped lead to the creation of the Indiana-sized Naval oil reserve in 1923.
The seeps also sparked decades of drilling that began in the 1940s, first by the Navy and later the U.S. Geological Survey, as the agencies sought to assess the reserve's energy potential.
They drilled 136 wells across the reserve, leaving wellheads and pipes poking from one of the nation's wildest places, with rusting fuel drums and old building materials sometimes left to rot.
Now the BLM, which inherited the mess when it took over management of the 23-million-acre reserve in 1976, is using $50 million secured by Sen. Lisa Murkowski in 2013 to remove some of the most troublesome wellheads.
"We want to make it look like the government was never here," said Nicole Hayes, BLM's project coordinator.
That's the way Barrow resident Shawn Brower wants it, too. Some of the wells needing cleanup are in an area where he owns a Native allotment and cabin – about 100 miles south of Barrow near the Ikpikpuk River.
Over the last two decades he's removed hundreds of rusting barrels, hauling them back to Barrow on hunting sleds and tossing them in the dump. They leaked diesel fuel into fishing spots, he said.
"It was affecting my subsistence," he said. "It's an environmental disaster, and this stuff doesn't belong here."
The BLM said the wells Brower wants addressed — known as the Oumalik wells — are among the 50 marked for removal. But more funding may be needed before the agency can fix those wells.
In an earlier, more expensive round of cleanup starting in 2002, the BLM and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plugged and remediated 21 wells at a cost of $99 million. Many of those were a priority because they were threatened by coastal erosion.
Using the recent shot of money, BLM remediated three remote wells last year, part of a $10 million effort that included removal of surface debris at Cape Simpson.
This spring and summer, BLM plans to clean up another 18 wells, mostly at Cape Simpson, with Native village corporations Marsh Creek and Olgoonik Construction Services doing the work.
That will make a big dent, said Kornze.
"At the end of this season, 21 of 50 wells will have been addressed, so it's going at a pretty good clip," he said.
On Tuesday, after arriving from Washington, D.C., he joined a group of BLM officials from Alaska in a tour of two remote cleanup sites, with a reporter and North Slope Borough Mayor Charlotte Brower in tow.
"I think this is one of the best things we've done," Mayor Brower said, referring to requests by her administration and others for cleanup funds.
"They won't be able to clean all the wells, but it's a great start," said Brower, Shawn Brower's aunt.
Alaska politicians have long blasted the federal government for imposing strict cleanup standards on the oil industry while dragging its own feet on the cleanup. More recently, the BLM has won praise from former critics, including Cathy Foerster, head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission that helps regulate the state's oil fields.
Removing signs of the wells can be a huge effort.
At Cape Simpson, Marsh Creek workers scraped a mobile camp out of the snow after hauling in trailers set atop skis to provide sleeping quarters for 20.
Case IH Steigers — powerful tractors outfitted with tracked wheels — hauled the trailers, excavators, water tanks and other supplies more than 300 miles from Prudhoe Bay across snow roads and sea ice.
Getting the gear to each camp took more than a week.
But the well cleanup can go quickly. Wells that had been properly plugged with cement in the old days can be sliced off below ground, then sealed and buried in less than a day. In a matter of days at Cape Simpson, Marsh Creek had remediated six wells.
Other wells are more troublesome. Those that need resealing – perhaps old cement failed or the plug wasn't large enough – can take several days to repair.
One heavy-duty job involves the well-known "whistling well" near Iko Bay, about 15 miles southeast of Barrow, where the Navy drilled in 1975.
The well hissed methane – a potent greenhouse gas -- into the air for years because wellhead components failed. That led to its nickname, and fears that subsistence hunters could kill themselves if they took shelter in the small well shack and struck a match.
On Tuesday, the weather-battered structure was gone and the wellhead, repaired days earlier, no longer leaked.
Marsh Creek workers were building a long snow and ice ramp so they could haul a small drilling rig above the well to yank out sections of oil casing.
They were building the ramp with a form of Arctic asphalt — layers of snow and water. The snow was hauled in specialized trailers, and water was sucked from an icy lake to strengthen the ramp as it freezes.
To be safe, workers plan to install a blowout preventer, an emergency device used to seal the well in case natural gas or oil shoots out, workers said.
Bill Sands, a longtime oil field worker, said Marsh Creek employees are happy for the work.
It comes at a time of widespread uncertainty on the North Slope, with low oil prices forcing the industry to shelve projects and slash jobs. An estimated 1,000 workers or more have been cut in the last year in Alaska, a good 7 percent of the workforce.
"We found our niche and we're sticking with it," Sands said. "It's work and it puts food on the table."
The cleanup has led to unusual discoveries as frozen wells are thawed with steam and brine water. The pipes have burped out a variety of old gear, even an ax handle that shot up because of pressure underground.
"Hammers, gloves, you name it," said Chad Munger, a Marsh Creek superintendent. "It seems like they just shoved everything down the hole when they were done working."
The early wells helped U.S. geologists conclude that the reserve contains mostly gas with pockets of oil. One widely accepted view says natural gas from below the Brooks Range swept north eons ago, forcing crude oil out of some reservoirs and causing the oil seeps.
But some reservoirs were protected by natural features, including giant Prudhoe Bay, one of the nation's largest oil fields.
The discoveries continue to inspire new explorers. East of the Cape Simpson cleanup, in frozen Smith Bay, an exploration rig operated by Texas-based Caelus Energy rose from the windswept snow like a giant column.
Turning west and looking out across the tundra, Kornze said the agency would clean up as many of the 50 wells as possible with the 2013 money.
"It does get progressively harder. The rest are out there," he said, gesturing toward the reserve.