Some good information to counter what the enviro-wackos spew.......
Drill Phobia
By Ben Prendergast
The North Slope of Alaska in early June is infinitely less hostile than it is in January, but almost as featureless. The temperature is in the 30s, and the flat, barren plain stretches, brown and desolate, to the horizon in every direction but north, where it drops into the icy Beaufort Sea under cover of high white clouds. The ground is two inches of mud interspersed with scraggly vegetation and drifts of unmelted snow and ice. The birds have begun to return to the shallow ponds that dot the landscape, many still frozen, but they’re the only immediately apparent evidence of life. The greening of the groundcover is still weeks away, as are two other prominent features of the brief summer season—the caribou and the hordes of mosquitoes. This time of year there is no night, no complete darkness, only several hours of twilight in the early morning.
Harsh winter reigns here nine months of the year, with roaring winds and brutal sub-zero temperatures. Despite the adverse conditions, winter is when the majority of the oil field work is done on the Slope, as the tundra is hard and ice roads can be constructed to ferry supplies and equipment to outlying satellite installations and new drilling sites. In a land where thermometers routinely drop to -60 degrees, portable heaters are everywhere, and the roustabouts and roughnecks scurry from warmth to warmth dressed in thickly insulated fire-resistant coveralls.
The DeHaviland Otter waiting to fly us to Phillips Petroleum’s Alpine field has Spirit of Deadhorse emblazoned on its tail. Evocative of frontier Alaska, perhaps, but not especially inspiring as a motto. From the air, the Alpine field appears as an island in a brown tundra sea. In many respects it is, functioning much like an offshore drilling platform. At a total of 94 acres, it’s the smallest oil facility on the North Slope, and the most technologically advanced. The drilling and production facilities are perched atop two gravel pads that insulate the equipment from the permafrost, and by virtue of new horizontal drilling techniques the entire 40,000-acre oil field can be accessed from 110 tightly spaced wells that will branch out from the tiny pads. Already, 20 wells are producing oil.
We land on the causeway joining the pads, which doubles as landing strip and access road, again to minimize the facility’s footprint, and are ferried to the office and living quarters. After being issued insulated coveralls, hardhats, safety glasses, and steel-toed boots we step out across the gravel to the plant. Dave Earl, an Alpine manager, leads us through the entire production facility like a proud father, pointing out the next-generation technology with enthusiasm. “This stuff is so cool,” he says with a chuckle. His pride is shared by other members of the Alpine crew, who are aware they’re practicing the most advanced oil drilling and production in the world.
The Alpine field, which began production only this January, is estimated to contain anywhere from 800 million to 1 billion barrels of oil. Under current technical and economic conditions, Phillips expects to draw approximately 430 million barrels from the reservoir. The extracted petroleum is high grade—a single gravity above diesel fuel in its unrefined state. Earl holds a bottle to the light with a grin. “That’s some sweet crude,” he says. “You could almost just burn this right in your tank.” And it’s flowing out even faster than expected.
As we walk, we notice that the entire Alpine production complex is suspended above its gravel pad, to further insulate the tundra. Pilings sunk through the gravel into the permafrost are insulated with sleeves filled with liquid ammonia that dissipate ambient heat. The processing equipment is extremely compact, designed to minimize sprawl.
Great efforts are made to avoid spills. Inflatable plastic pans hang under every vehicle to catch even tiny engine crankcase drips. Phillips environmental consultant Mike Joyce notes that the company reports all leakage, no matter how inconsequential. “We don’t want to get caught up in whether it’s a quart or a gallon. Ninety percent of the spills are extremely small, and never get off the gravel pad or outside a building.” One British Petroleum employee, queried about the frequency of spills, snorts with derision at the talk of catastrophic pollution: “There’s more oil spilled in the parking lot of your average Wal-Mart.”
All waste at Alpine, from the drilling mud used to pressurize the wells to other industrial as well as personal trash, is ground into a paste and injected back into wells, thousands of feet down. The goal, says environmental coordinator Tom Manson, is to leave behind little evidence of industry.
The most remarkable feature of the Alpine facility, however, is the drilling rig. Operated by Alaska’s Doyon firm, which specializes in arctic exploration, the rig employs horizontal drilling in a way not seen before on the North Slope. From this single location, innumerable wells can be bored horizontally to any point of the compass within five miles. Employing an advanced bit and directional drilling motor, the course of the hole can be altered in progress. Sophisticated sensors send impulses back though the drilling mud indicating the location and status of the bit. These are interpreted by computers and technicians in the control room who can make instant adjustments. This has immensely speeded up the drilling process, made it more accurate, and allowed access to vast underground areas without creating the sort of industrial disruption seen on the surface in the past. At the time of our visit the crew was boring a 72-degree hole three miles down and out.
“We’re going to be doing some real neato stuff here on this pad,” says Don Mickey, Phillips’ representative on the rig, with a grin. The technician in charge of the drilling system states in a thick northern England accent that despite his years of service on drilling rigs around the world, he is still impressed by the technology he currently commands. “Ten years ago,” he says, “we wouldn’t have dreamed of doing this. Now 75 percent of all wells are directional.”
Alpine is the template for future oil exploration and production on Alaska’s petroleum-rich northern rim. Just such high-tech, environmentally sensitive rigs would be used, on a handful of sites, if Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—the most promising oil resource left in North America—were opened to oil exploration. But that’s a political decision, and for the present at least, the political will does not exist in Washington to even meaningfully debate opening ANWR.
In October 1973, amidst hostilities between Egypt and Israel, Arab OPEC nations imposed an oil embargo on the U.S. and several other western countries. Supplies were reduced month by month in an effort to bring pressure on the U.S. and thus the Israelis. The price of gasoline skyrocketed, supplies were rationed, and long lines at filling stations became commonplace. National transportation and economic production was reduced to a crawl. At times, gas stations simply had no fuel to offer, and had to post “No gas today” signs.
In early November, only weeks into the embargo, President Nixon urged in an address to the nation, “Let us set as our national goal, in the spirit of Apollo, with the determination of the Manhattan Project, that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy source.” Editorial pages burst with calls for conservation and increased domestic oil production.
Well, guess what? In 1973, the U.S. imported some 35 percent of its oil. At present, almost 60 percent of our supplies come from abroad. U.S. national security is now more threatened than ever before by dependence on foreign oil. A 1973-style supply interruption today would have catastrophic consequences for our quality of life and our economy.
Canada, currently the United States’ most secure foreign oil source, is likely to remain a stable and assured supplier, but the majority of our other exporters are politically precarious nations. The Middle East is as worrisome as ever, perhaps more so, with Israel again enveloped in strife and Islamic fundamentalism on the rise. Iran’s political and religious leaders are clashing, as they did in 1979, when the fall of the Shah sent a secondary quake through world petroleum markets. Venezuela, the single largest seller of crude to the U.S., is currently governed by a president rhetorically hostile to America. He recently called for cooperation with Cuba, China, Libya, and other states to “resist American hegemony.” Meanwhile, Colombian guerrillas have repeatedly sabotaged the critical Cano Limon-Covenas pipeline this year, reducing export flows. And in Indonesia, Exxon was recently forced to abandon natural gas fields due to guerrilla attacks. Instability in other parts of that country is also compromising oil production.
As the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Robert Ebel said in testimony before Congress in the spring of last year, a refusal to explore for oil and gas domestically, “means we have given up on ourselves. We have agreed to place our future well-being in the hands of nation-states whose national interests may not always coincide with ours.”
It is our second June day on the North Slope, the sky has begun to darken, the wind has risen, and we dig out parkas and gloves. From the isolated speck that is Alpine we fly to the Kuparak field. If Alpine represents fourth-generation oil drilling technology, Kuparak is second-generation. Compared to Prudhoe, where the techniques of arctic oil extraction were pioneered in the 1970s, the 1980s Kuparak facilities are more compact and advanced. But next to Alpine, even those methods seem sprawling and crude.
A basic facility for separating oil from the water and gas that rise to the surface with it used to take up 65 acres. Today, it averages nine. Separate wells used to be drilled no closer than 150 feet apart. Now they can go in at a spacing of ten feet. The cumulative result is that oil production facilities are much less intrusive than they were just a few years ago.
On the other side of Kuparak lies Prudhoe proper. The transition is dramatic. Prudhoe is a large complex that looks like some Midwestern industrial facility. The entire Alpine facility could fit on a fraction of the pad that supports Prudhoe’s gas treatment plant alone. There are roads, processing centers, equipment depots, and modular housing for the personnel who rotate in and out on two-week shifts. There are no schools, no families, no permanent residents.
While not exactly picturesque, the advantage of already having Prudhoe on the North Slope is that a great deal more new oil production could be supported without much new construction. Prudhoe serves as a central headquarters for many vendors and technical firms, has air and marine terminals, and overnight facilities. It has a seawater treatment plant. It sits at the top of both the 489-mile Dalton Highway and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which carry supplies in and out. New fields can thus be brought on line with only comparatively modest amounts of planning, investment, and tundra space.
During its peak throughout the 1980s, Prudhoe sent more than 1.5 million barrels of oil down the Alaska pipeline every day. Production began to decline at the close of the ’80s, and this threatens to make some facilities obsolete in the near future. If fresh North Slope exploration and production don’t continue, the whole Prudhoe complex could become uneconomic to operate, resulting in a massive and costly shutdown. Energy production from America’s Arctic would come to an abrupt end.
Lonnie Brooks, a geophysicist with Geoarctic Consultants, oversaw the only seismic surveys ever conducted in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in the winter of 1984-85. The surveys were conducted in the small fraction of the reserve specifically earmarked for oil assessment when the refuge was established in 1980. Known as the 1002 area, it encompasses 1.5 million acres on the northern edge of ANWR’s total 19 million acres.
Brooks says his survey indicates strongly that there are significant undiscovered petroleum reserves in the 1002 area. “Even the surface expressions of the rocks there indicate the presence of petroleum,” says Brooks. “I mean, you can chip a chunk off and smell the oil. So the oil has been in those rocks, there’s no question about that. Just to the west of ANWR, at Prudhoe Bay, is where the largest oil discovery in North America was made, and just to the east the Canadians have made tremendous gas finds in the Mackenzie River delta. So it’s surrounded on both sides by highly productive areas.”
In 1998, the initial data gathered by Brooks’ team was reinterpreted by the U.S. Geological Survey, raising the estimated number of barrels in the reserve to as much as 16 billion. Brooks, who is in a better position than almost anyone to know, hints that even these figures are likely to be low-end estimates. “There are a lot of reasons to suspect that if we went back in there and did some more intensive exploration we’d find oil in large producible quantities,” says Brooks. “In the 1998 reassessment, under an administration hostile to the effort, they came up with even higher estimates of oil potential.” Asked to compare ANWR to potential oil deposits in other parts of the U.S., Brooks says flatly, “The most prospective place left in the United States is in the ANWR.” Or as one employee of a firm now exploring in Alaska puts it, “The 1002 is the big enchilada.”
The evolution of seismic technology provides an opportunity to dramatically reascertain the oil potential of ANWR. With the advent of three-dimensional seismic surveying, geologists are now able to walk through virtual representations of geologic formations. The amount of data the 3-D surveys provide, compared to the 2-D surveys Brooks used to evaluate ANWR almost 17 years ago, is often compared to the difference between an X-ray and a CAT-scan. The new imagery provides a wealth of fresh detail, and has led to dramatic increases in the success rate of test drilling. Whereas exploratory wells used to come up dry as often as nine times out of ten, today many companies are finding producible oil in 80 percent or more of their shots into the dark.
In this year’s budget, the Bush administration has requested the means for a careful 3-D survey of ANWR so its true potential can be accurately assessed. Environmentalist opponents in Congress, however, are in the process of stripping out any such funding. They’d apparently rather not know too many specifics about the reserves; the results, they realize, are likely to be oily. So this summer Congress will officially go on record in favor of ignorance and obscurantism.
Despite its industrial aspect, Prudhoe hosts animal life without apparent disruption. In the course of two days, we spied a grizzly sow with two cubs lounging next to a major processing center; an arctic owl dining on some species of rodent amidst a grid of pipelines; an arctic fox crossing a gravel road on the hunt; and innumerable birds, from arctic terns and ptarmigan to enormous tundra swans, right beside the oil facilities.
The caribou that calve in the Prudhoe area, known as the Central Arctic herd, have actually increased dramatically in number since the arrival of the oil industry—from 6,000 animals 30 years ago to nearly 30,000 today. While there is no reason to think that oil patch activity has caused this increase, it obviously hasn’t harmed the creatures. This caribou explosion sharply contradicts one of the prime environmentalist arguments against exploration—that drilling might spook the creatures from their calving grounds. To Mike Joyce, who spent 27 years on the North Slope studying its resident animal populations, that is faulty thinking. “After 30 years of oil production,” he says, “our caribou herd is the largest it’s ever been…. How much evidence can you ask for?”
Joyce reports that other wildlife populations in the immediate area of Prudhoe are on the increase as well. In addition to the prospering caribou, long-term studies of the grizzly bear, arctic fox, tundra swan, seven or eight species of ducks and geese, and all the shorebirds have found, according to Joyce, “that all of those populations are healthy and stable, and some are growing.” For the few species in decline, “the stress is coming from elsewhere,” says Joyce, “particularly, in the case of the birds, in disruption of their habitat in the lower 48 states.” For the record, there are no endangered species in ANWR, and the subsistence-hunting native village closest to the 1002, Kaktovik, is firmly in favor of exploration and development.
Contrary to popular images, oil drilling is not the ecological nightmare opponents like to project. In truth, importing oil in tankers is considerably riskier for the environment. The reality is that oil production is currently taking place in wildlife refuges all across the United States. Rigs have been operating for nearly 60 years, for instance, in Florida’s Big Cypress National Reserve, in the immediate vicinity of the Everglades National Park. In Louisiana, there are more than 1,600 oil and gas wells in wildlife refuges. Some have actually operated on land owned and leased to oil companies by the Audubon Society. Across the country, the Fish and Wildlife Service allows drilling in more than 20 wildlife preserves and refuges.
In each case, oil and gas development peacefully co-exists with wildlife preservation. Indeed the financial bounties (and, in the case of offshore rigs, the fact that the platforms function as a kind of artificial ocean reef) have actually helped improve the status of the flora and fauna in many areas where oil is produced. Considering that most of this successful existing development is of older vintage and does not employ the advanced technology that now allows small footprints and relatively gentle methods of extraction, it’s completely irrational to argue that future oil and gas production cannot co-exist with ecological health.
The drilling that takes place in the refuges mentioned above has happened because the rights to the minerals beneath the land on which the refuges rest are in private hands. The subsurface rights in ANWR, on the other hand, are, except for a small parcel of native lands, under government control. This has allowed the issue to become a political football.
The only place exploratory drilling has taken place in ANWR is in the native-owned Kaktovik area on the northern fringe of the refuge. But discoveries there are currently useless, because there is no way of transporting any produced oil or gas without crossing federal lands. The mineral rights to the rest of the 1002 area remain under federal jurisdiction. So despite strong support for exploration from the state of Alaska, area natives, and petroleum geologists, opponents of energy production have so far scared Congress out of allowing any access to what is likely the richest oil resource in North America.
What makes the locking up of ANWR even more significant is that the same pattern is being repeated almost everywhere else in the country. To a remarkable degree, opponents have scared politicians out of allowing access to any of America’s most promising unexplored oil and gas regions. The options for high-potential exploration have been evaporating on an almost daily basis, for entirely political reasons. In just the last few weeks and months, Congress has acted to bar exploration off the coast of Florida, under the waters of the Great Lakes, and in national monuments (many of them so-designated by the departing Clinton administration in midnight decisions) in the Rockies and elsewhere.
And it isn’t only Congress doing the obstructing. In California, a state judge ruled in June that the state could unilaterally halt all new exploration, and even development of existing leases, in waters off the central coast. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled in favor of a ban on exploration on National Forest lands in Montana on account of their “value and spirituality of place.” The mere suggestion of studying oil and gas exploration off the Eastern Seaboard brought such vocal opposition from environmentalists and their allies this spring that the Bush administration summarily abandoned plans for research.
This sort of absolute opposition to any form of energy development has gone beyond the well-known phenomenon of NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”). The new protests can be characterized as BANANA (“Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone”), or, the ultimate in obstructionist acronyms, NOPE (“Not On Planet Earth”). These are comic terms, but the knee-jerk opposition to resource development they describe is no laughing matter for the nation.
America is far from exhausting its native energy resources; enormously valuable reserves of natural gas and oil remain in numerous locations across our continent. Consider the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida. The U.S. Minerals Management Service estimates that the eastern Gulf off the Florida panhandle is home to some 2 billion barrels of oil and 8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Destin Dome, a single reservoir 25 miles offshore from Pensacola that has undergone preliminary exploration by Chevron to the tune of $100 million, is estimated to contain more than 2.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Reports issued by the EPA and the Interior Department in April concluded that exploring for natural gas in the Dome posed no significant threat to the overall environment or Florida’s beaches. Even a theoretical catastrophe at a natural gas rig would simply result in methane bubbling to the surface and mixing into the atmosphere (as it does every day in enormous quantities, via sources ranging from volcanoes to cattle). Yet, the Florida political leadership, of both parties, chose to ignore the research, and insisted somewhat hysterically that drilling would pose an unimaginable threat to the tourist industry.
Another potential energy treasure chest within the continental U.S. is the Great Lakes region. But NIMBY, BANANA, and NOPE forces are mobilizing against a Bush administration suggestion that the deposits be examined. In the face of activist protests, the House of Representatives voted at the end of June to forbid the Army Corps of Engineers from granting leases under the Great Lakes. Politicians in seven of the eight Great Lakes states supported the ban; only Michigan Governor John Engler resisted. A frustrated Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) complained of “obstructionism” that is part of “a broader effort to systematically choke off every promising source of domestic energy.”
“There is no amount of oil under the Great Lakes worth putting one-fifth of the world’s fresh water at risk,” orated Rep. David Bonior (D-MI). Ignored amidst the emotional rhetoric is the fact that Canada has done extensive drilling on the northern shores of the lakes, in particular around Lake Erie, without a single significant spill. Michigan, too, has had oil wells in operation since 1979 along Lakes Huron and Michigan, with no adverse environmental effects. Moreover, the actual method of extraction proposed for most parts of the Great Lakes doesn’t employ offshore rigs at all. Just as at the Alpine Field, the reserves under the lakes could be accessed from shore by slant drilling, but environmentalists are just as adamantly against this.
And it isn’t only drilling under the lakes that stirs up furor. Proposals to lay natural gas pipelines between New York and Canada across the floor of Lake Erie, and between Wisconsin and Indiana along the bed of Lake Michigan, have also been attacked fiercely. Opponents insist that the pipelines will stir up pollutants buried in lake sediment and foul the water.
Ironically, the lake pipeline proposals were advanced specifically to avoid the predictable opposition to overland routes. No such luck. Despite the increasing demand for natural gas in Great Lakes-area states, it seems that anyone actually attempting to provide the needed energy in the future will be forced to run a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” gauntlet of just this sort.
With over 1 billion barrels of oil and many trillion cubic feet of natural gas sitting off California’s coastline, you might think that development of the Golden State’s offshore resources would be part of any plan to overcome the state’s chronic and now infamous energy shortages. But you’d be wrong. In 1999, the governor’s office, panicked by the Clinton administration’s move to extend existing leases off the central coast to allow further exploration, filed suit demanding California regulators be allowed to supersede federal authority and make the final judgment on the leases. In late June, a U.S. District Court judge acceded.
The California Coastal Commission, an environmentalist-dominated body, will now be responsible for overseeing the energy development process, and the likelihood the Commission will approve the leases is low. The Commission itself has come under court scrutiny. It may be an unconstitutional organ since more than two-thirds of its members are appointed by the Democrat-led Legislature rather than elected. But that question is yet to be adjudicated, and meanwhile energy exploration and development is in limbo.
Onshore in California, exploration faces even higher hurdles. The Carrizo Plain is a section of the San Joaquin valley 50 miles long and eight miles wide, surrounded by some of the most productive oilfields in the country, and is judged by the USGS to have more promise as an oil-producing area than all but a handful of sites in the continental United States. But it was declared a national monument in the last days of the Clinton administration.
Unlike ANWR, the Carrizo Plain actually is home to many threatened or endangered species, and there is a long history of local opposition to its development. Energy producers insist they can tap the reserves without harming the environment but, as with offshore leases, political pressure from California’s massive and influential Green lobby makes development a longshot. Energy crisis or no energy crisis, California appears determined to block resource development of any kind on lands where the political process can be used to stop it.
So, Californians and other Americans increasingly turn their hydrocarbon-hungry eyes to Louisiana and Texas. The outer continental shelf deposits off these two states are the only relatively uncontroversial reserves left to explore and produce in the entire U.S. Of the 1.5 billion acres of U.S. outer continental shelf, only 200 million are unlocked for oil and gas exploration—virtually all of it in the western Gulf of Mexico.
As onshore and near-shore deposits have been steadily depleted over the last 50 years, Gulf production has moved farther and farther into the ocean, to the point where 50 percent now takes place in water 1,000 feet deep or more. The U.S. Minerals Management Service has estimated that the Gulf of Mexico is home to over 37 billion barrels of oil. If the NIMBY-BANANA-NOPE forces continue to have their way, the Gulf is likely to be our only significant new domestic source of petroleum for years to come. While sizable, it will cover only a fraction of annual U.S. consumption. Those benighted Louisianans and Texans, along with their Alaskan cousins, might save America from a full-fledged collapse in energy production, but they can’t carry the ball alone.
Compared to the environmental hysteria that now reigns in virtually every other part of the U.S., particularly in regard to offshore drilling, the enormous energy productivity and ecological success of America’s western Gulf stands as a stark contrast—and a rebuke. The fact is, both prodigious amounts of oil and prodigious amounts of seafood have been taken from the waters off Texas and Louisiana for half a century. And contrary to the predictions of alarmists, local fisheries show no evidence of decline. Shrimp harvests this year, for instance, are projected by the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission to match or exceed the record bounty of 2000.
The politics of resource development in the United States have in recent years become an almost impenetrable thicket of raw emotion, environmental pseudo-science, new-age spirituality, and simple illogic. Individually, some of the regulations obstructing energy development (like historic antiquities laws or endangered species protections) seem reasonable enough. But their execution is often rigid and unwise, and when taken as a whole, this overlapping fabric of seemingly innocuous regulations for the benefit of beetles and forests and tourists and beachfront homeowners becomes an oppressive fortress wall. The bans forbid intelligent energy extraction from proceeding in parallel with any other uses of any given piece of land.
Using whatever legal club and emotional sympathies are handiest in each case—caribou herds here, Indian graves there—the goal, often pursued with near-religious fervor, is to restrict human development and usage of any kind in any “natural” landscape. It has become something akin to thought crime to suggest that untouched land is sometimes an over-costly luxury. There seems to be no recognition in the environmental community, or in most of the media, that this country’s broad wealth, good health, and rich culture are built on industrial development.
In this doctrinaire refusal to make sensible compromises with the energy requirements of an advanced, electronic, high-mobility civilization, Green activists are guilty of either willful ignorance or egregious hypocrisy. Will the Californians who say they’ll accept offshore rigs only over their dead bodies really accept having their children sent home uneducated from school, or lifeless from the hospital, because there was no power to keep society humming? Of course not. They expect Texans or Kuwaitis to provide them with their industrial and residential lifeblood, without any disturbance of the view from their surfside decks.
If environmentalist restrictions and NIMBY demands are indulged to the point where energy development becomes a practical impossibility—as it already is in many places—the standard of living that Americans enjoy and take for granted will suffer. Massive restrictions on industry are presented by Greens as a painless process that will magically yield a higher “quality of life,” when in fact industrial obscurantism and energy Luddism inevitably conspire to shackle our citizenry.
The war against careful use of ANWR and other restricted areas in the United States is a vivid example of just that sort of false promise. Already, penalties are beginning to accumulate. If and when this country is revisited by a real energy supply crisis, it will quickly become apparent that today’s environmental utopianism is an impoverishing and profoundly anti-democratic impulse.
While we will surely continue to learn how to use energy more efficiently over time, there is no chance of reducing America’s energy needs drastically in the near future. And meanwhile, there’s no such thing as a free tank of gas. America’s energy has to come from somewhere. Is there really a better option at this moment than opening the energy storehouse that awaits in the flat, graceless, lightly animaled, harshly climated, and utterly remote North Slope of Alaska? As a young Schlumberger engineer summed up on our return flight from Prudhoe to Anchorage, predicting that the 1002 area will be opened eventually: “There’s nobody up there. I mean, nobody lives there. About where else can you say that?”