Obama Administration Moves Against Alaska Oil Drilling

[kpete]

Source: Mother Jones

Obama Administration Moves Against Alaska Oil Drilling
—By Tim McDonnell| Wed Aug. 17, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in remote northern Alaska is home to a surprisingly diverse array of wildlife: polar bears, caribou, wolverines, lemmings and others all call the frigid, windswept place home. But one infamous strip of coastline in the massive refuge is also home to nearly two billion barrels of recoverable oil (enough, the feds estimate, to supply America for nine months), which has placed it squarely in the center of a decades-long controversy over whether to open the ecologically sensitive region for oil and gas development or keep it locked up as wilderness.

On Monday the US Fish and Wildlife Service took the first step in granting increased federal protection to a relatively small, oil-rich region within ANWR known as the "1002 area" by nominating it for wilderness designation in a lengthy report on conservation plans for ANWR. Only Congress can declare wilderness areas, and the "preliminary recommendation" made in the report is only the beginning of a long (and possibly dead-end) road to approval. But it is the first time such a recommendation has been made since the area was set aside for study in a 1980 federal law (from which the area takes its name), and environmental activists and the FWS agree that it marks a major turning point in an ongoing struggle in Alaska between conservationists and oil and gas developers.


"We're still a long way from getting to the end of the road, and we don't know where the road is going, but it's a step" toward more comprehensive protection for the area, FWS spokesman Bruce Woods said.

The way things stand now, area 1002 is within the wildlife refuge but still potentially open to oil and gas development (with a permit from Congress, which it has yet to grant anyone). Monday's report found that the "coastal plain" region of ANWR (a large swatch that contains area 1002), along with the Brooks Range mountains and Porcupine Plateau, meets the requirements outlined in the Wilderness Act for what can be designated wilderness—which, Woods added, do not include considering protection against potential development. Then again, he said from his Anchorage office, "most of Alaska would qualify (as wilderness), including some places I could slingshot from where I'm sitting now."

Read more: http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/08/anwr-wilderness-designation

[WhiteTara]

1. I hope that there can be a stemming of the tide

of industrialization in the fragile wilderness.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. My only question is

whether Sarah Palin will have the patience to allow Rebecca Mansour finish Palin's "official statement" on that decision or whether she can't wait for it and Palin will Twitter her blathered outrage.

[Auntie Bush]

3. The aggregating thing is the US won't get that 9 mo. of oil.

It will just be added to the total world supply...maybe even going to China. :( The oil companies will make all the profits and we get the chance of an oil spill that would be impossible to clean up. What will happen to all those poor animals? They will freeze to death! All for profits of big oil. :puke:

[glinda]

4. Overwhelming majority in public don't want drilling there. They continue to ignore the public.

[bhikkhu]

5. The "oil-rich region" may not be oil-rich at all

...as there was only one test hole drilled, about 40 years ago, and the results were never published. There has been far more political brouhaha over ANWAR, and far more political hay made of it, than there ever was oil industry interest over the years.

So if its back in the news, it will probably become a big talking point again, and all the familiar misinformation trotted out. Estimates of the oil there all go back to it being potentially similar to Prudhoe Bay, rather that actual exploration in ANWAR. Many geologists think that Prudhoe Bay was an anomaly, and ANWAR may well be dry, but we don't know by a long-shot.

If its like Prudhoe Bay, they estimate a peak flow rate of 1mbpd out of it, optimistically, which would be about 5% of US daily consumption. A significant drop in the bucket, but not much more than that.