Roger wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu
> [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of Roger G. Olson
> Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 4:36 PM
> I'd like to see some comments and analysis from the
> petroleum, energy, and environmental afficiandos regarding
> the relative environmental from the proposed exploration and
> exploitation of the ANWR deposits vis-a-vis that is known to
> be happening the Alberta tar sands and the potential
> exploration of CO/WY oil shales.
>
> The ANWR issue is certainly a divisive political one. I've
> heard much rhetoric from both political extremes with little
> of a supporting factual nature. But, how would a worse-case
> environmental scenario in ANWR compare with stripmining the
> Green River oil shales, for example. What would be the
> best-case scenario for ANWR?
There is no oil operation that leaves zero imprint just as there is no
human activity which leaves zero environmental imprint. But compared to
oil shale and tar sands, Anwar would be a breeze by comparison. You
would have oil wells, which means maybe a 900 sq foot pad for the rig
and equipment, but with modern horizontal drilling, those rig pads can
be minimized to a greater degree than occurred on Prudhoe Bay in the
70s. Today we can drill 15000 feet away from the surface location, so
the surface impact of a field today would be so small as to be almost
unnoticed. The biggest impact would be the pipeline. When the Alaska
pipeline was built, the environmentalists claimed that it would kill off
the caribou and would cut off their migration pathways. The pipeline
company was forced to have raised sections so that caribou could go
under the pipeline. When the pipeline was built it was discovered that
in the winter the caribou loved to hug the thing because the oil coming
out of Prudhoe is hot and the pipeline meant warmth. And the caribou
were found walking on the unraised parts of the pipeline. In other
words, they jumped up on parts not meant for them to cross over. In
those regards, the environmentalists were simply wrong.
Just so people will understand what my justification for these
statements are, I used to work for the company that discovered Prudhoe
Bay and was a 25% owner of the pipeline.
If I needed oil and had a choice of ANWR or oil shale, I would choose
ANWR for having the least environmental impact. BTW, there are oil
seeps on ANWR. Arctic flies lay their eggs in the oil. It is part of
the ecosystem. If an oil company were to have an accident and spill oil
up there, the flies would thrive. Not that we want to waste oil that we
can sell.
Received on Thu Jul 1 22:23:27 2004
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