con ANWR drilling

“all those on this side of the fence, let yourselves be known and post.”

“Was there any doubt?”

“I am here, let me be counted!”

“Absolutley against”

“at first glance, I'm opposed.”

“Who among us would NOT oppose?

I'm immeasurably opposed to the new subdivision that's mowing down "my woods" across the road from my house...
but that doesn't keep it from happening - those new folks 'gotta live somewhere.

My truck, et al, needs petroleum, too.
Sad, but true.”

“count me in!! :)”

“Whatever it is, I'm agin' it...and if it's screwing drilling ANWR, I'm doubly agin' it!”

“Humans will not learn. Alternative energy is available but is not funded by the business and political establishment because of greed. I see this as one example of a genetic flaw in humans' makeup that will probably lead to our extinction.”

“No drilling in ANWR!!!!!!! I love debating this topic on this site, especially because Phil tells us that the Feds check us out on a regular basis.
Intelligence must prevail.”

“NO to ANWR drilling.”

“Down with ANWR drilling! We don't need the oil. Let it be.”

“They had a great article in Outside Magazine covering this topic this month.

The author describes an extensive amount of wildlife in the area, and the natives subsist off of the caribou herd there. Hopefully they'll leave the area alone!”

“In the end it will not matter how many are against it or why, or that it's just a drop in the bucket; the oil is there and they will take it. Even the Exxon Valdiz did not stop the oil from flowing.”

“Before they take the oil from the ANWR why don't they quit selling the oil from the Alaskan pipleine first. That oil is sold to Japan and other countries, now we will probably start giving it to North Korea”

“Here's an interesting take on the ANWR debate by a conservative gun/hunting enthusiast named "Al Agnew":

I just got back from three weeks in Alaska, including a bunch of time driving up the Dalton Highway (otherwise known as the "Haul Road") which parallels the Alaska Pipeline from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay, flying to Kaktovik, the Inuit village on Barter Island, which sits in the Arctic Ocean just off the coast of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and visiting the tundra of the refuge by foot and plane. During that time I talked to a bunch of people who know what they are talking about (as well as taking the $35 tour of the Prudhoe Bay complex and looking the whole thing over from the air), and the level of misleading and superficial discourse in the media and among the politicians in the lower 48 (and even in Alaska) is pretty dismaying. I got info either firsthand or secondhand but with a lot of credibility from villagers in Kaktovik, the Alaska Fish and Game biologist (now retired) who spent much of his career studying the Arctic caribou herds, two documentary film-makers who have spent this whole summer in ANWR filming, various Alaska natives from small settlements along the Dalton Highway, Fairbanks and Anchorage area residents, and my own eyes. Here is what I learned.

Who really wants to drill in ANWR, and why? According to off the record sources in the business, the oil companies themselves aren't all that interested in it. No matter how you cut it, getting oil from ANWR would be EXPENSIVE...something like 4 times or more as expensive as getting it in the usual places. And since the price of oil is set globally (doesn't matter much where you get it, you can only charge the going rate), the oil companies don't see much profit in it. (Which also means, obviously, contrary to what our President recently said, getting oil from ANWR ain't gonna lower the price at the pump any...not to mention that production wouldn't begin until 8-10 years from now, which won't help current problems one bit)

However, who WILL make money, and LOTS of it, off the development of ANWR oil fields, are the oil field development companies, those who build the infrastructure. Which, among others, includes Halliburton, a major player in Prudhoe Bay. Halliburton isn't the only development company at Prudhoe, or even the largest...or even the worst as far as laxness in following regulations for both environmental protection and working conditions.

However, the prevailing opinion, certainly backed by the actions of the Bush administration, is that the REAL reason they want to open up ANWR is to set the precedent that ALL wildlife refuges and other public lands (including National Parks and wilderness areas) can be opened to energy development. Get drilling approved in ANWR, both a wildlife refuge and the finest example of true wilderness in America, and nothing is sacred.

About the caribou, one of the biggest reasons given by anti-drilling people to keep ANWR off limits...this is a complex subject. Basically, there are three major Arctic caribou herds (there is a fourth, smaller herd, but it probably isn't relevant to the discussion), the Porcupine Herd that inhabits ANWR, the Central Arctic Herd inhabiting the coastal plain that includes Prudhoe, and the Western Arctic Herd, which inhabits the huge expanse of land to west of Prudhoe, which is open to energy development but has not been extensively developed as of yet. Proponents of drilling ANWR like to cite the health of the Central Arctic herd, which has lived with Prudhoe Bay development for close to 25 years. At the time of the opening of the Alaska Pipeline, this herd numbered about 5000 animals, and today it numbers around 25,000 (the oil company line, as given to me by the guide on the tour, is 4000/27,000, the other figures come from the biologists...just a slight exaggeration). Sounds good, doesn't it? However, what they DON'T mention is that during that same time, the Western Arctic herd, which has almost exactly the same life cycle and the same habitat (only minus the pipeline and Prudhoe) rose from the same figure of 5000 to 85,000! In addition, the overall health of the Western Arctic herd, as evidenced by the age make-up, is much better. The population of both herds was at an historic low at the time the pipeline was completed, due to a series of springs with cold, wet weather, and has prospered since because the winters and springs have been drier and warmer.

What of the Porcupine herd during that same time period? It was at about 80,000 to begin with, and has actually declined slightly during that time. Why the difference? Unlike the other two herds, warmer, wetter weather hurts the Porcupine herd. This herd migrates through the Brooks Range in the autumn to the south side, and migrates back north to the calving grounds on the North coastal plain in early spring. To do so, they travel the river valleys, and actually atop the frozen rivers. Warmer, wetter springs thaw the rivers too early, before the caribou can get through the mountains, slowing their migration (they even have been forced to drop their calves along the way).

The porcupine herd MUST get to calving grounds on the coastal plain, where there is plenty of nutritious feed that they can't get in the mountains, in order to have the best success in calving. Actually, they must get to specific areas on the coastal plain which are higher and drier, to get some relief from the bugs. And the coastal plain in ANWR is only 12-20 miles wide between the mountains and the Arctic Ocean, unlike the North Slope in the area of Prudhoe Bay and the pipeline, which is 80-90 miles wide. I've always heard the coastal plain in ANWR described as flat, wet, and buggy, with little to recommend to "tourists". But I can tell you it isn't all flat or wet, it isn't exceptionally buggy by the time I was there (though it most definitely is earlier), and the Brooks Range looms over all of it, making it exceptionally beautiful country (the range is visible only from about half or so of the coastal plain through which the pipeline runs because of the much greater width).

So...will oil development on the ANWR coastal plain effect the caribou? I've heard over and over that only about 300 acres of something like 1.9 million will actually be affected. That seems to me to be pure BS, after seeing Prudhoe. Prudhoe was originally one big, more or less consolidated field, but as it has been depleted (the original field is petering out fast) development has spread until it covers an arc of over 150 miles, with drilling pads, permanent roads leading to them, and pipelines leading from them to the central gathering and separating complex, from which the oil flows into the pipeline. So...given the nature of the finds so far in ANWR, which are many smaller and scattered fields to begin with, those same drilling pads, roads and pipelines are going to have to be spread over a BIG area. Directional drilling will help, but you can't reach it all from only a few locations (and what you can reach will be REALLY expensive oil). So, how are you going to get all the recoverable oil, get it to where it can be separated from the byproducts (natural gas, water, and geologic material), and get it to the rest of the world? The Arctic Ocean is only open 2-3 months of the year, so that means roads and pipelines. We've all seen the photos of caribou peacefully coexisting with the pipeline and Prudhoe Bay development. But, most of the photos are dominated by bull caribou. Bulls couldn't care less about the pipeline. Cows can put up with it once the calves are getting good growth by autumn. But cows getting ready to calf and cows with very young calves are extremely skittish creatures, and any unnatural feature that causes a "visual fence" (like the cattle guard lines painted on an asphalt road are visual fences to cattle) will impede the movement of calving females. Pipelines and roads are terrific visual fences. Even the traces of roads left from seismic exploration may impede caribou cow movements, and I saw plenty of tracks from seismic exploration in the Prudhoe area. The exploration is done in the winter, over temporary "ice roads" made by spraying water and letting it freeze (which is another thing that is easier said than done on the North Slope, which gets less than 6 inches of precipitation per year...which means possible depletion of freshwater ponds deep enough to keep open water at the bottom, a very important habitat feature). But the ice roads both compact the soil above permafrost and take longer to melt in the spring, causing their own visual fences (a line of ice across otherwise open ground) and causing major changes in vegetation patterns which persist for at least 30 years and possibly for the foreseeable future (I saw ones that had been made 20 years ago in one section of ANWR). These seismic exploration lines would be made in grids with each line one kilometer or less from the next, eventually over every bit of the coastal plain that looks promising for oil.

In addition, the pipelines themselves alter vegetation patterns, because the shade they throw on the ground beneath in an otherwise nearly shadeless land means that the pipeline corridors are the last to thaw in the spring...even more effective visual fences at the critical time.

So, what about what the native people who live there want? Native Inuit of Kaktovik have been wined and dined and paraded around Washington DC to speak on behalf of opening up ANWR. But opinion in the village is actually about evenly divided. And the natives who want the development don't want it for the reasons you would think. You have to understand two facts. One, the Inuit for the most part make their living from the sea (or at least they did before they started getting oil revenues). They are still a whaling people. They kill three whales a year and bring them to Kaktovik, along with seals, and share among the whole village. They really don't care much about caribou, they don't depend upon them for food and they don't hunt them, though they wouldn't pass one up if it wandered within shooting range of the village.

Two, as the Prudhoe Bay field is getting depleted, the oil companies have started moving off-shore to drill. This is a totally new and untested deal, entailing running pipelines under the sea from the drilling sites to land, in a piece of very shallow sea that is covered in moving pack ice for nine months. Nobody can assure that the pipelines can withstand that. And the Inuit are scared to death that a major accident or two on the Arctic Ocean will seriously affect their whaling and sealing. So they are for drilling in ANWR because they hope it will take the incentive for ocean drilling away.

And what you don't hear as much of because they don't live on the coastal plain is the opinion of the Kwichin Athabascans, who inhabit the south side of the Brooks Range. They do subsist almost entirely on caribou, and they are scared to death that drilling in ANWR will ruin their livelihood, because, remember, the caribou that calve on the coastal plain are the same caribou that they live on in the fall and winter. They are almost universally against exploiting ANWR.

As for the rest of the Alaskan population, which get revenues from oil, there is a lot of support for ANWR oil, but it is not often realized that there is one big difference between ANWR and Prudhoe. Every man, woman, and child that is a resident of Alaska gets oil revenue, which peaked at about $2500 a year per person at the height of Prudhoe Bay, not to mention the state services funded entirely by oil royalties and the lack of sales taxes and other taxes. That figure per person is now at about $1000 and dropping as Prudhoe slackens. But, when the feds and the state divied up most of the state at about the time oil exploration got into gear, the state got title to much of the Prudhoe Bay area. So the state gets most of the royalties off Prudhoe Bay oil. However....the federal government owns ANWR. The feds will get the royalties, with the state only getting about 10%. It just won't be much of a direct economic benefit to the citizens. And neither will it be a huge economic boom as Prudhoe was, since Prudhoe is petering out and much of the employment and infrastructure will probably simply shift from Prudhoe to ANWR. It will help keep the Alaska government from going bust for a while, but it isn't being sold that way by the politicians, who are painting a much rosier picture.

Finally, keep these figures in your head...at best under current estimates, there is enough recoverable oil in ANWR to furnish about 2% of our domestic oil demand for a period of about 20 years, and that IS the high end of current estimates. And there won't be oil being produced, even if drilling is okayed right now, for 8-10 years.

It's a stunningly beautiful land, with great sweeps of treeless tundra under shining mountains and wandering, brawling rivers...and it's about as pristine as you'll find anywhere in the world. I saw caribou, grizzlies, polar bears, moose, musk oxen, arctic foxes, lynx, golden and bald eagles, short-eared and snowy owls, and a myriad of waterfowl. I can't wait to go back. And I sure want to see it stay much the same as it is now, and not like the spawling complex of Prudhoe or even the Dalton Highway, as beautiful as THAT drive is.”

“Thanks for posting that.

I think your exactly right, now send that to your Rep, Senator and the Chairman of the Energy Committee.”

“As much as I hate it when people post long cut & paste jobs, this one has a lot of good info.

Thanks mutt.”