A Distorted View of ANWR
"The resource update compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey should provide a cold shower of reality for those who continue to seek a justification for oil drilling within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This assessment makes the probability that other Prudhoe Bay exist under the coastal plain - the biological heart of the refuge - vanishingly small."
--Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in a statement dated May 17, 1998
The Study
A new study by USGS puts the mean estimate for oil in place under the ANWR coastal plain at 20.7 billion bbl. The previous estimate, done in 1987: 13.8 billion bbl. If there's any "shower of reality" for drilling supporters, it's a hot one: a 50% expansion of the exploration target.
USGS raised the 95% probability estimate to 11.6 billion bbl of oil in place from 4.8 billion bbl. The 5% probability estimate eased up to 31.5 billion bbl from 29.4 billion bbl. USGS attributed the gains to reprocessing of 1984-85 seismic data and to information from wells drilled nearby.
The USGS estimates of technically recoverable oil in place are impressive for their size although not comparable to the 1987 estimates because of changes in study methods in this category, the mean value for the federally owned coastal plain is 7.7 billion bbl.
Extrapolating from this to a best guess is, of course, tricky. The USGS identifies a number of possible oil accumulations in 10 plays. Within that distribution at the mean estimate for technically recoverable oil, there could be 2.6 billion bbl of oil in three deposits under the western coastal plain if the economic threshold for development is 512 million bbl/field. USGS notes that operators nowadays development 150 million bbl fields on Alaska's North Slope.
The conservatively estimated 2.6 billion bbl may not be a Prudhoe Bay, but it would make a strong contribution to U.S. petroleum supply. It would, for example, represent 12% of the current estimate for total U.S. oil reserves. It would approximated the country reserves of Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, or Gabon.
By any reasonable standard, 2.6 billion bbl of technically and economically recoverable oil is worth finding and producing. It represents wealth, jobs, incomes, and revenues for the Alaskan and federal governments.
But Babbitt - Mr. Cold Shower of Reality - doesn't apply reasonable standards. He just doesn't want drilling to happen in ANWR. So he accommodates the facts to his desires.
"The USGS data assessment indicates that any oil under the Arctic Refuge coastal plain is more likely held in a multitude of small reservoirs," he says. "The implication is clear: to recover this oil would require the kind of infrastructure that would forever and drastically alter the landscape of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, now dedicated to the conservation of Alaska's magnificent wildlife and wilderness resources."
Babbitt's assertion about a "multitude of small reservoirs" is incorrect. It is not what the USGS assessment indicates. To the contrary, the USGS ignores potential deposits of less than 50 million bbl in place and postulates a development threshold of a half billion barrels to keep its reserves guesswork prudent. Since the analysis doesn't suit the official prejudice, however, the official misrepresents the analysis.
Lost credibility
And what is there to say about leveraging all of Alaska's wildlife and wilderness resources on the possibility for drilling on the 1.5 milllion-acre coastal plain?
Babbitt lost credibility last year when he called opponents of the Clinton administration's position of global warming un-American. This attempt to distort a decidedly optimistic assessment of the ANWR petroleum resource adds to long-standing questions about his fitness for office.
