Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
For many on the other side of the i ght over the future of American
energy, that's precisely what's so worrying. Lit le time has passed since
the Deepwater Horizon disaster gripped the nation. Years of promises
that of shore drilling presented virtually no risk of major accidents were
gut ed in an instant, and trust will be dii cult to rebuild. Yet less than
a year at er the spill, on January 11, 2011, the National Commission
on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Of shore Drilling, char-
tered by the Obama administration and counting at least one die-hard
environmental campaigner among its members, came to a blunt con-
clusion: “Drilling in deepwater does not need to be abandoned. It can
be done safely.” 20 But theirs was far from a laissez-faire verdict. “h e
central lesson to be drawn from the catastrophe,” they concluded, “is
that no less than an overhauling of both current industry practices and
government oversight is now required.” Despite a broad range of steps
taken by government and industry in response to the spill and to the
commission's report, many still fear that even though deepwater drilling
has returned apace, of shore drilling remains unsafe. 21
T ight oil and of shore drilling have dominated oil-related headlines
in recent years. But before the tight oil boom began to transform
North Dakota, and before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill vaulted of -
shore drilling into every living room, the most important bat lei eld in
the i ght between oil developers and environmentalists was a sliver of
the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
h ere is one big reason the 6,100 square kilometers that make up
Area 1002 of the refuge, known in energy circles simply as ANWR,
have been the target of industry interest for so long: the oil there is
cheap to produce. Long before rising crude prices made it proi table
to extract oil locked in shale rock or buried thousands of feet beneath
the sea, the economics of ANWR already worked. Back in 2000, when
people still expected oil to sell for around twenty dollars a barrel for-
ever, government analysts estimated that the refuge might be able
to deliver as much as two million barrels a day of oil within twenty
years, and they were coni dent that peak output of at least a million
barrels a day was likely—numbers that most people still believe, give
or take a few hundred thousand barrels a year. 22 Contrast that with
 
 
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