War Over Arctic Oil

By Terry McCarthy

White. No horizon. In the distance, sky and tundra fade together into a blue-white wash. The Arctic landscape has a great many shades of white: the crystalline white of blown snow. The gray-green white of ice on the sea. The silver white of a fox's fur. The turquoise white in the northern sky an hour before the sun comes up in the south to illuminate another short winter's day.

White. Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska, standing on the floor of the Senate last month, holding up a blank sheet of white paper. That, he says, is all you can see in winter on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's coastal plain--just "snow and ice." So what could be wrong with drilling for oil in such a bleak, deserted region in the distant northeastern corner of Alaska? There is nothing there.

White. Evon Peter, a Gwich'in Native American from the southern fringes of the wildlife refuge, stands atop a hill and looks out over the whiteness. He starts naming it: "Vatr' agwaahgwail"--the line of a caribou trail. "Vatthaih ik"--Snowy Owl Mountain. "Shih han"--Brown Bear River. Each part of the landscape has a name and a story, often related to the caribou the Gwich'in depend on for food. As he speaks, the whiteness comes alive. "When I stand here, I feel I am free," says Peter, a staunch opponent of oil drilling. "Here nature is the only law."

That may be about to change. With two former oilmen in the White House, a Republican Congress calling for greater access to public lands out West, and high energy prices worrying consumers, America's last true wilderness is under attack. The 50-year-old debate over whether to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, known as ANWR(pronounced An-war), is shaping up as the defining environmental battle of the Bush presidency. For months, George W. Bush has spoken in favor of drilling for oil in the refuge. As rolling brownouts swept California, he argued that Alaskan oil exploration would keep the crisis from spreading--even though oil-fired generators produce just 1% of California's electricity.

Bush's energy-policy task force, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, had its first full meeting on ANWR last Friday, and Bush and Cheney have made it clear that drilling there will top their list of recommendations. "I campaigned hard on the notion of having environmentally sensitive exploration at ANWR," Bush said last month, "and I think we can do so." Environmentalists counter that just as there is no way to be half-pregnant, there is no "sensitive" way to drill in a wilderness.

Later this month Murkowski plans to introduce a Senate bill calling for oil exploration in 1.5 million acres of the ANWR coastal plain, north of the Brooks Range and east of the Canning River--a section known as Area 1002. Murkowski's legislation, like the Bush recommendations that will follow it, faces stiff opposition in the evenly divided Senate, not just from Democrats but from a key bloc of at least eight Republicans--Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Bob Smith of New Hampshire, James Jeffords of Vermont, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois and Gordon Smith of Oregon--who have the power to defeat the bill. (Only three Democratic Senators, Louisiana's John Breaux and Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka, both of Hawaii, have come out so far in favor of drilling in the refuge.) Murkowski promises to attract antidrilling Senators to his cause. What remains unclear is how hard Bush intends to fight for oil exploration in the Arctic refuge. If ANWR is in the Bush energy bill, New Hampshire's Smith tells TIME, "it will be the lightning rod, and very good parts of the energy bill will be lost. I think it would be a mistake to have it in."

Smith and his fellow Republicans don't relish the idea of voting against their President--especially if Bush decides to make ANWR a test of party loyalty. But the legislators from environmentally conscious states also know the public remains troubled by the idea of drilling in the refuge. In the latest TIME/CNN poll, a majority of those surveyed, 52%, said they oppose drilling there, while 41% were in favor. Environmental groups, which argue that the oil deposits in question could amount to less than a six-month domestic supply (see box), are confident they can win this war. "If we have to have a first big battle, this is a good one to have," says Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club.

But big oil is also optimistic that it can push through a bill before oil prices come down and the sense of crisis abates. "We are in a window, which basically forces us to go flat out," says Roger Herrera, a 33-year veteran of British Petroleum who now lobbies for opening ANWR in Washington. "We'll use a range of arguments. National security, dependence on unreliable sources in the Middle East, cost of energy. The best way of winning is to make people concerned about the cost of filling up their gas tank. It will all be over by September."

For now the refuge is intact, with little more than 1,000 tourists visiting a year. Established by President Eisenhower in 1960 as America's last unspoiled frontier, the area contains large populations of caribou, moose, musk oxen, wolves, foxes, grizzlies and polar bears, along with loons, snow geese and many other species of migratory birds. It was doubled in size, to 19 million acres, by the Carter Administration in 1980. But at the same time, with millions of barrels of oil being extracted from neighboring Prudhoe Bay, Congress set aside 1.5 million acres along the coast of the refuge--the so-called Area 1002--to be investigated for its petroleum potential. In the most recent study, in 1998, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that there could be between 3 billion and 16 billion bbl. of oil in Area 1002. In 1989 the Senate Energy Committee was ready to authorize drilling when the Exxon Valdez disaster spilled almost 11 million gal. of oil, polluting more than 1,000 miles of Alaskan shoreline. The bill was shelved. Six years later, during the Newt Gingrich era, Republicans pushed another bill, but President Clinton vetoed it.

To get an idea of what drilling for that oil would do to ANWR, it helps to visit Prudhoe Bay, America's largest oil field. Just beyond the western edge of the refuge, Prudhoe lights up the tundra for miles with megawatts of yellow industrial light. Steam belches from plants eight stories high; flames shoot from natural-gas flares; and bulldozers the size of houses grind back and forth along 500 miles of roads that link the 170 drilling sites along the coast. Five thousand men--and a few women--work here, pumping 1.3 million bbl. a day down the trans-Alaska pipeline. The scale of the facilities swallows them up, and the oil plants seem almost deserted.

The oil industry has worked hard to clean up its act. New technologies allow wells to be clustered more closely together, with drilling done laterally below the surface--reducing the number of installations on the tundra. Pipelines are now built 5 ft. above the surface to allow animals to pass beneath. A truck leaking a pint of transmission fluid is treated as an oil spill, reported as such and laboriously cleaned up. Even so, there are limits. "Drilling for oil is an industrial process," concedes Ronnie Chappell, the main spokesman for BP Amoco on the North Slope. "Some things you can't get rid of--like pipelines." The oil industry by its very nature is rugged and intrusive.

Thirty-five miles out on the tundra and 30[degrees] below zero, a seismic crew is at work, stringing out lines of microphones in front of a 56,000-lb. "thumper truck" that sends vibrations through the earth in search of oil pockets. These are the toughest jobs in the industry. The 94-man crew works and lives out of a mobile camp: 30 bright-orange mobile homes on steel skis, linked together in six trains. In a season they will cover 400 square miles. The men travel the North Slope in Sno-Cats with rubber tracks to minimize damage to the tundra. "We always used to be cautious, but now we are walking on eggshells," says Kurt Kinder, the Phillips Petroleum rep on the seismic team. But the tundra, like eggshells, is fragile, and once broken cannot be repaired.

The contrast between Prudhoe Bay and ANWR--between human industry and wilderness--is starkest when you fly between them. The plane journey from Prudhoe east to the village of Kaktovik takes 35 minutes; halfway there, you pass over the Canning River, and suddenly the pipelines, roads and yellow-lit oil wells are left behind, and the unbroken whiteness of the refuge spreads out as far as the Canadian border. The 8,000-ft. peaks of the Brooks Range rise up on the south side, just 50 miles inland from the frozen fringe of the Beaufort Sea to the north. The flat plain in between is home to those who live closest to the refuge--some of the 7,000 Inupiat Eskimos who live along the North Alaskan coast. The Inupiat, by and large, favor drilling in ANWR. The other Native American tribe in the region, the 5,000-strong Gwich'in, who live in Arctic Village and other settlements on the southern fringe of the refuge, opposes it. The two tribes disagree on the issue as fundamentally as the Republicans and Democrats in Washington.

The houses in Kaktovik, pop. 260, have drifts over their roofs. Snowfall isn't heavy on the northern slope of the Brooks Range--usually no more than 18 inches annually--but winds that reach 100 m.p.h. pile it in drifts against anything that rises above the tundra. The Inupiat who live here still hunt whale and seal for food. Boats jut from the snow along the small airstrip, which turns out to be a sandspit sticking out into the frozen sea. During the day, the only sounds come from dogs barking outside their houses and the occasional snowmobile or pickup crossing the village. At night, the northern lights play in the skies above, pale-green sheets of fire shooting up through the heavens.

The Inupiat believe oil revenues and land-rental fees from oil companies will raise their living standards. "My concern is for our benefits," says Isaac Akootchook, 78, a Presbyterian preacher and former whale hunter. "Oil is really important for our young people, for education and health care." Akootchook is worried, however, that once established in the refuge, the oil companies might move offshore to drill--and that he would oppose, because it could interfere with the bowhead whales the Inupiat hunt when the sea melts in the summer.

Akootchook's daughter Susie also supports drilling but is concerned about the social impact of oil money--especially the availability of alcohol. Kaktovik, like many of the native villages in northern Alaska, bans alcohol by law. "We are trying to keep alcohol out, but already it is sneaking in," she says. "We have real nice people here before alcohol, but it really destroys families."

If the social impact of drilling is unpredictable, so too are its effects on wildlife. Wildlife-management experts are concerned the winter activities of oil companies could disrupt the denning of pregnant female polar bears along the shoreline. Musk oxen could be driven from their riverside habitats, where oil companies come to find gravel and freshwater. And grizzly bears, which come out on the plain in summer, will likely again prove they are incompatible with oil camps. In the Prudhoe area, grizzlies were often relocated and sometimes shot when they became too intrusive.

Most important of all are the more than 130,000 caribou of the Porcupine herd, which migrates each spring onto the coastal plain to calve. These caribou are at the heart of the environmentalists' case against drilling. In late May, the animals arrive on the plain after traveling 400 miles around the mountains, to give birth far from their predators: the eagles, wolves and grizzlies that live principally in the mountains. After calving, they forage on the rich greenery that springs up in the 24-hour sunshine. As new snow approaches, they return to the forests on the south slopes 400 miles away, where they find shelter and feed off lichen growing on trees. If drilling begins in the refuge, environmentalists fear, the migration will be disrupted.

"Caribou will move away from oil fields as disturbance increases," says David Klein, professor emeritus at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. In the Prudhoe oil field, he says, the 25,000-head Central Arctic herd of caribou was displaced from oil developments. "The pipeline and [nearby] haul road have essentially fractured the Central Arctic herd into two groups," Klein says.

It is impossible to know how the Porcupine herd will be affected by oil drilling. But Evon Peter and the other members of the Gwich'in tribe fear the worst. Peter lives in Arctic Village, pop. 130, on the southern slopes of the Brooks Range. The caribou come through his area every fall, and the Gwich'in hunt them to feed the whole village. "The caribou for us are like the buffalo were to the Indians of the Lower 48," says Peter. The Gwich'in are worried drilling will drive the caribou away into Canada forever. "Our struggle," says Peter, "is spiritual--about dignity, respect and the ways people relate to each other."

Dignity and respect are in a battle against money. Alaska residents pay no income tax or sales tax and get an annual dividend from the state's oil earnings--last year it was roughly $2,000 for every man, woman and child. Not surprisingly, drilling in ANWR is widely supported, and Bush's election was met with glee. But many Alaskans have no illusion that the decision to drill, if it comes, will be part of a coherent energy policy.

"What it is going to come down to is a couple of hundred guys in D.C. pushing the panic button, because that's the way it always happens," says Kaktovik mayor Lon Sonsalla, who supports drilling but is unhappy at how little the local communities have been consulted on the issue.

Very few of the people in Washington with their finger on the panic button have ever seen the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (Murkowski is planning to lead a Senate delegation here when the weather warms up.) For those who do travel to Alaska's far north, the experience stretches the imagination. To visit a new drilling station in Prudhoe, one that extends only a few acres on the surface but can access 75 square miles underground, or fly over a convoy of trucks spraying water on the tundra to form ice roads strong enough to bear the weight of mobile drilling rigs is to be in awe of our industrial prowess. But to walk at sunset over the tundra of the refuge--where there is silence, an eternity of chill whiteness, a lone raven high overhead and the tracks of an Arctic fox leading toward snowcapped mountains under a pale sky of aquamarine and violet--is to be in awe of something far greater. America now faces the momentous decision of what to do with all this whiteness.

--With reporting by Ann Blackman and John F. Dickerson/Washington

With reporting by ANN BLACKMAN AND JOHN F. DICKERSON/WASHINGTON