Re: Comparison of ANWR with tar sands and oil shales

Roger Olson wrote:

"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."

Glenn is correct in saying the degree of environmental damage inflicted by modern oil exploitation is incomparably less than that from strip mining. However, to drill wells in that part of the world would require sizable buildings to house the drilling equipment and the workers. The facilities would be much like those of an offshore platform, only on land. The footprint would still be small compared to the size of subsurface structures being tapped, and extremely small compared to the size of ANWR.

These days it would be hard to imagine any serious drilling up there without fairly extensive 3D seismic surveys. These surveys would cover a lot of the surface, but they could be done with minimal damage.

I worked for a short time on a seismic crew on the Mackenzie river delta, which is to the east at about the same latitude. Both the Mackenzie delta and ANWR are deserts in terms of the amount of precipitation they get. I recall no sign of any vegetation there in the winter, even though the river supplies the area with lots of water. If my recollection is correct--and I know for sure we spent no time cutting vegetation, presumably ANWR is similar in this respect, so there would be no need to clear paths for ANWR seismic crews.

The crew worked only in the winter, when everything is frozen solid down into the permafrost. (I recall an almost constant -30 deg F, day and night.) So even though the vehicles they used were quite large, they left no tracks except in the thin layer of snow that covered the ground. At that time the seismic sources were 100 pounds of dynamite set off in holes drilled (I think) 100 ft or more deep. The Canadians often preferred dynamite, even though vibratory sources were available and (I believe) would have worked in that kind of weather. If one were to use vibrators, there would be no shotholes and hence possibly no damage at all that could be detected in the summer or the following winter from such a seismic survey.

Heavy supplies could likewise be delivered only in winter, when trucks would dig no ruts no matter how heavily they were loaded. Furthermore, there might be no need to build roads: The vehicles we used for transportation had huge balloon tires that could cross almost any terrain in the area, road or no. Light supplies could be delivered after the melt by helicopter.

Nevertheless, any desert terrain is easily damaged--if it's not frozen solid; and any damage stays detectable for a long time. When such terrain is in the far north, the problem is compounded, because any vegetation that might cover the damage grows very slowly.

(Flying over forests in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon I noticed multitudes of long, linear swaths cut through them in every which direction. They were what was left of clearings for seismic lines that had been shot some years--maybe decades--before; and they were still easily visible. I found out later that Canadian hunters and fishermen love these things, because they've made lots of lakes and streams accessible that never would have been otherwise!)

Despite the strength of the environmental arguments that can be made in favor of exploiting ANWR's oil, I've never seen estimates of likely reserves that are anywhere near those for the tar sands or oil shales. Sobering.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Glenn Morton<mailto:glennmorton@entouch.net>
  To: 'Roger G. Olson'<mailto:rogero@saintjoe.edu> ; asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 6:57 PM
  Subject: RE: Comparison of ANWR with tar sands and oil shales

  Roger wrote:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu<mailto: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 Fri Jul 2 03:37:47 2004