Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - Part 2
I think it is safe to say that all sides agree that oil is located within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The current debate centers on whether we should drill for the oil, or leave it in the ground. Several organizations are leading the charge to save ANWR and protect the animals that live there. The Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, and Defenders of Wildlife are just some of the groups that are lobbying Congress to keep the oil companies out of ANWR.
ANWR is a 19.6 million acre area of land (as large as the state of South Carolina) that has been called America’s Serengeti. The refuge is divided into three regions, an 8 million acre wilderness area, a 9 million wildlife refuge, and the 1.5 million acre 1002 Area. The Kaktovik Inupiat Corporation owns the remaining land. A large portion of the refuge is dominated by the Brooks Range, an east-west running mountain range that extends across Alaska. The part of the refuge being debated is the Coastal Plain, a 100 mile long and 15 to 50 mile wide section of land along the north coast of the refuge. Environmentalists are working to get Congress to designate the 1002 Area as a wilderness area, effectively saving it from any commercial or industrial development. See my next article (ANWR - Part 3)to understand the perspective of the oil companies on this issue.
The refuge is home to a variety of animals that live in a delicately balanced ecosystem. There are 180 species of birds that live and use the refuge as nesting grounds every year. 45 species of mammals (36 land and 9 marine) live within the refuge. And there are 36 species of fish that can be found in the rivers and ocean of the refuge. This doesn’t include the many species of plants or insects that also inhabit the refuge. It’s no wonder with all of this wildlife and undeveloped space that the refuge has been dubbed America’s Serengeti.
The campaign the environmental societies and scientists are running focus on a couple of main points; that there’s not enough oil to make it worth our while, and that any production will drastically affect the wildlife living in the refuge.
The politicians and oil companies will lead us to believe that oil produced from ANWR will be America’s salvation and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. They state that they have and will follow environmentally friendly policies in exploration and production of the oil fields. How accurate are these statements? Existing North Slope oil fields produce nearly 1 million barrels of oil per day. America is the largest consumer of oil in the world, using 25 percent of the world’s oil (about 19 million barrels per day or 7 billion barrels per year). Assuming a mean of 5.3 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil, we will only find a 9 months supply of oil in the 1002 Area. It will also take from 7 to 10 years before any of this oil is available to consumers in the United States. (Conversely, increasing the fuel efficiency of automobiles to 45 mpg for cars and 34 mpg for trucks would save 3 million barrels of oil each day.)
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