ANWR is a 19.6 million acre area of land (the size of South Carolina) that was set-aside in 1980 as a wildlife refuge. 17 million acres of land are protected and not open to any commercial or industrial development. Only 8 percent of the refuge, 1.5 million acres designated the 1002 Area, were left in limbo, their status to be determined by Congress at a later date. Many environmental groups have been lobbying Congress to give the 1002 Area wilderness status and thus forever block any chance at extracting this valuable commodity from the ground, while the oil companies want to move in and produce the oil that is there in an environmentally friendly way. This article will examine the reasons the oil companies put forward in favor of drilling. To understand the perspective of the environmentalists, read my previous article on ANWR (ANWR - Part 2).
Since the development of the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, there have been many advances in the oil industry. Chief among these has been the decrease in size of the footprint (how much land is covered) of the well pad. Today’s pads are must smaller and more efficient. A single pad toady can drill laterally out to a distance of 4 miles and can drain an area 64 square miles in size. A pad that would have been 65 acres in size in the 1970’s, today, takes up less than 9 acres of land and has the same number of wells. If the Prudhoe Bay oil fields were developed today, they would take up 60 percent less space. New techniques also mean that the mud and cuttings generally associated with drilling operations, and once dumped into large pits above ground, can now be injected back into the ground through disposal wells.
The size of the pad is not the only development. New drilling technology now makes it possible to drill several wells from a single wellhead. Multi-lateral wells allow several new wells to be drilled underground from an existing vertical hole of an existing well. This conserves resources since one pad services many underground wells rather than one. New techniques in geophysical data and seismic surveys allow geologists to build complex 3-D seismic maps of the subsurface. This gives a better detail of the oil-bearing rocks, and means fewer exploratory wells are drilled. The use of water to create ice roads and ice pads help to keep any environmental impact to a minimum. In fact, most drilling and construction takes place during the winter, to minimize any impact of the wildlife.
