Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
deepwater drilling, oil sands, tight oil, and other sources that mostly
don't make sense at prices below i t y dollars, and the decades-long
focus on ANWR is a lot easier to understand.
For as long as industry has wanted to drill in ANWR, environmental-
ists have wanted to stop it. h e refuge is home to polar bears, caribou,
and the shaggy muskox, a prehistoric beast that some groups claim is
endangered. 23 h ree decades of bat le have turned ANWR into a critical
litmus test: to support its opening is to declare that you are on Team
Oil, and to oppose it is to show you are serious about the environment.
h ere has long been no in between: when the U.S. Senate took votes in
2005 on cranking up fuel ei ciency in cars and trucks and on opening
ANWR to exploration, only three senators out of a hundred said yes
to both. 24 Geology and economics may have moved on—ANWR is
no longer as important to U.S. oil as it once was, and technology has
shrunk the environmental footprint that would accompany develop-
ment—but the political world has not.
Indeed Alaska could become even more controversial: ANWR
might not need high oil prices to work, but high oil prices and melt-
ing sea ice have turned the forbidding waters of the of shore Arctic
into a tempting target for drillers. In many ways, this is the i nal fron-
tier of extreme oil: the Beaufort and Chukchi seas can feature waves
topping twenty feet, and (at least for now) they are packed with ice
from November to May. 25 Dealing with spills would be doubly dif-
i cult: beyond the usual challenges, even scat ered sea ice can render
typical cleanup strategies impotent. No serious analyst expects that
the of shore Arctic could deliver much within the next decade. But
the National Petroleum Council, a group that advises the U.S. secre-
tary of energy and includes many such analysts, reports that Arctic
drilling could potentially deliver upward of a million barrels a day
within about i t een years. h is means that when it comes to assessing
whether the United States could produce far more oil not just for a
few years but also over several decades, the Arctic looms large.
W hen oil watchers tally up the big prospects for U.S. oil production
over the next decade, they typically have tight oil, of shore drill-
ing, and Alaska at the top of their lists. Each source seems to present a
 
 
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