While media focus was on Joe Biden’s decree putting a tiny plot of land within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) off limits to oil and gas exploration, reporters ignored the bigger story.
Biden’s other proclamation forbids tapping more than 10 million acres within the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, a 23-million-acre area on Alaska’s North Slope. That is the area that should replenish the crude oil drawdown stemming from Biden’s oil withdrawal from strategic wells established in case of war.
The president’s latest cancellation of oil and gas leases on federal lands nails Washington refiners. His actions are pigheaded, unwise and wrong.
Allowing new Alaska exploration would help Washington refineries, workers and state and local economies, which are geared to handle Alaska’s crude oil.
Our state’s refineries are equipped with sophisticated safety and pollution control equipment — the best in the world. They are unlike many foreign refineries located in hostile countries that will benefit from additional U.S. purchases.
ANWR is not the picturesque landscape you might imagine, with towering snow-capped peaks and lush green forests. It is 19 million acres of frozen desert larger than the states of Massachusetts, New Jersey, Hawaii, Connecticut and Delaware combined.
Although the 1.5 million acres in ARWR, called the coastal plain, were set aside for future leasing in 1980, drilling would occur on less than 2,000 acres. That’s like a small dot on an 8-by-10 sheet of paper.
“The U.S. Geological Survey estimates this sliver of land contains at least 10.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 8.6 trillion of natural gas, and those estimates are probably conservative,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized. By comparison, Alaska’s second-biggest oil field, Kuparuk, holds about 2.5 billion barrels.
Exploration and construction would take place during the winter over roads built on sheets of ice. When the ice melts in the spring, the roads disappear. Drilling and production have strong and long-standing environmental safeguards.
The crude, which is 12,000 feet below ground, would be extracted by a widely-used technique known as horizontal drilling. Production wells would be spaced roughly a dozen feet apart yet would reach out for miles in different directions underground. The oil would then be piped to Prudhoe Bay and sent 800 miles south via the existing TransAlaska Pipeline.
Washington's five refineries provide nearly 4 percent of our nation’s processing capacity. Those refineries processed nearly 638,000 barrels of crude oil per day resulting in roughly 11 million gallons of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.
Alaska crude comes to our refineries in double-hulled ocean-going tankers. Since the Exxon Valdez incident in Prince William Sound in March 1989, state-of-the art redundant marine safeguards are aboard ships. Tanker crews have extensive safety and response training.
If federal leases in wildlife refuges seem unorthodox, they really are not. The National Audubon Society earned more than $25 million (2001 figure) in royalties by allowing oil and natural gas production in Louisiana’s Rainey Wildlife Refuge and Michigan’s Baker Sanctuary.
Ironically, the Rainey refuge (26,000 acres) is the winter habitat for snow geese migrating from Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge while the Baker Sanctuary, a 900-acre wetland, provides hundreds of Sandhill cranes with a critical nesting area.
In fact, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey commissioned in 2001 reported 77 of 567 wildlife refuges in 22 states had oil and gas activities on their lands.
If drilling and exploration are safely done in existing wildlife refuges, why would it be an “environmental apocalypse” if a tiny portion of ANWR was opened to exploration? It would not!
Opening ANWR for leasing helps our state and our five refineries. Tapping into Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve is a safety net for America.
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Don C. Brunell is a business analyst, writer and columnist. He retired as president of the Association of Washington Business, the state’s oldest and largest business organization, and now lives in Vancouver. He can be contacted at theBrunells@msn.com.
