National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska

In March of 2002 the United States Geological Survey (USGS) issued a press release in which they announced that new assessments of the National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska (NPRA) showed that the NPRA "contains significant volumes of technically recoverable oil and gas resources", greater than was previously thought. With the debate over drilling rights for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) (see my previous articles on the ANWR debate) set to begin again in congress, the focus this year is again turning to domestic oil production as a way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The USGS assessment of the NPRA will play a critical role in determining where drilling will be allowed to happen in Alaska. But what is the National Petroleum Reserve, and what has changed in this most recent USGS assessment?

History
The National Petroleum Reserves have been a principle part of the United States government's strategic oil reserves for nearly a century. The reserves were originally called the Naval Petroleum Reserves and they and the Naval Oil Shale Reserves were set aside as a reserve of crude oil to fuel U.S. Navy warships. The Reserves came about through the Pickett Act of 1910, which allowed the President to set aside large areas of land California and Wyoming that had the potential for oil-bearing rocks. President William Taft was the first president to set aside lands for the Reserves in July 1910, as he set aside land near Elk Hills, California.

New reserves soon followed with the Buena Vista Hills Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 2 and the Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 3. NPR-2 is located in California and most of the tracts of land owned by the government have been leased to private oil companies. NPR-3 is located at Teapot Dome, Wyoming and is still owned and maintained by the Department of Energy. (You may remember Teapot Dome from your history as one of the scandals that rocked the administration of President Warren Harding.) Along with these petroleum reserves, three oil-shale reserves were set aside between 1910 and 1925.

In 1923, President Harding set the last, and largest of the naval reserves aside. Known as the Naval Petroleum Reserve, Number 4, the reserve covered 23 million acres on Alaska's north slope (roughly the size of the state of Indiana). The area had been known to contain oil from natural oil seeps and it was presumed to contain a large amount of oil.

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