Free Big Miracle by Tom Rose Page B

continued to climb. It remained unknown to all but a handful of missionaries and white traders until shortly after World War II. The cold war gave Barrow and its location a sudden burst of strategic importance. By the early 1950s, Barrow’s northern periphery was the perfect site for the U.S. Air Force to build its Distant Early Warning Line (DEW Line) radar station to alert against Soviet bombers flying overhead on their way to drop nuclear bombs on the United States or Canadian mainland.
    At its peak in the mid to late 1950s, DEW Line employed hundreds of locals before being made obsolete in the 1960s by the intercontinental ballistic missile that flew too high and too fast to stop. The rest of the town continued their age-old hunt for bowhead whales, whose population was recovering from the days of unrestricted commercial whaling.
    On February 18, 1968, Barrow’s fortunes changed again. After $125 million of fruitless drilling on the tundra 270 miles east of Barrow at a desolate place called Prudhoe Bay, the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) finally struck what was the then the single largest single oil and natural gas field ever found. Geologists in the late 1960s’ estimated there might be 15 billion barrels of oil and up to 26 trillion cubic feet of natural gas just two miles beneath the surface. To see just how far the science of oil and gas drilling has advanced since then, projections published by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in 2009 estimates that the Barrow/North Slope coast contains 83 billion barrels of oil and 1,600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in recoverable untapped reserves.
    The Eskimo always thought that the black liquid they called Uqsruq that oozed from the surface of their frozen land was a poison of an angry spirit, not that different to what medieval Arabs thought oozed from their lands. They watched as Uqsruq killed people, strong birds, and mighty animals. But the white man seemed to find great value in it. Soon the Inuit would see the benefits and want his share of them. So anxious were outsiders to use this plentiful and powerful resource, they would commit the largest private capital investment up to its time—$20 billion—to designing and building the massive infrastructure needed to safely and efficiently get the oil out of the ground and through 825 miles of pipeline stretched across some of the world’s most treacherous terrain and onto super massive supertankers at the Southeastern Alaskan port city of Valdez waiting to transport it around the world to be refined into gasoline to power our cars, trucks, and airplanes we rely on to get us where we need to go.
    The fields at Prudhoe Bay would provide, at their peak in the mid-1980s, nearly a quarter of all the oil consumed in the United States, or nearly 2.2 million barrels of oil per day. Alaska’s three-dollars-per-barrel tax on state-produced crude generated enough revenue to fund 90 percent of Alaska’s state government. Alaskans of all kinds seemed only too delighted. Good thing for Alaskans that the oil companies were as greedy as they were. The state taxes paid on their profits were so great, that Alaskans themselves paid no state sales, property, or income taxes. By the late 1980s, Alaska was not only America’s least taxed state, it was also its fastest growing state. A coincidence?
    By 2011, just two North Slope oil fields, Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk, had delivered more than 16 billion barrels of high quality American produced oil to the Lower 48. But by 2011, production had declined by nearly two-thirds, causing the oil pushed through the pipeline to travel much more slowly and at lower pressures, dramatically increasing the problems of clogging and rapid freezing, threatening the long-term viability of the multibillion dollar pipeline—precisely as environmentalists had been hoping for all along. If the pipeline is forced to close, Alaska laws require that it be dismantled.
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