Alas­ka's Last Oil

• Re­port rights in­fringe­ment
• pub­lished: 09 Dec 2014
• views: 173917

The ques­tion of whether to drill for oil in the Arc­tic Na­tion­al Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) has been an on­go­ing po­lit­i­cal con­tro­ver­sy in the Unit­ed States since 1977. The issue has been used by both Democrats and Re­pub­li­cans as a po­lit­i­cal de­vice, es­pe­cial­ly through con­tentious elec­tion cy­cles, and has been the sub­ject of much de­bate in the Na­tion­al media. ANWR com­pris­es 19,000,000 acres (77,000 km2) of the north Alaskan coast. The land is sit­u­at­ed be­tween the Beau­fort Sea to the north, Brooks Range to the south, and Prud­hoe Bay to the west. It is the largest pro­tect­ed wilder­ness in the Unit­ed States and was cre­at­ed by Congress under the Alas­ka Na­tion­al In­ter­est Lands Con­ser­va­tion Act of 1980.[4] Sec­tion 1002 of that act de­ferred a de­ci­sion on the man­age­ment of oil and gas ex­plo­ration and de­vel­op­ment of 1,500,000 acres (6.1×109 m2) in the coastal plain, known as the "1002 area". The con­tro­ver­sy sur­rounds drilling for oil in this sub­sec­tion of ANWR. Much of the de­bate over whether to drill in the 1002 area of ANWR rests on the amount of eco­nom­i­cal­ly re­cov­er­able oil, as it re­lates to world oil mar­kets, weighed against the po­ten­tial harm oil ex­plo­ration might have upon the nat­u­ral wildlife, in par­tic­u­lar the calv­ing ground of the Por­cu­pine cari­bou. Prud­hoe Bay Oil Field is a large oil field on Alas­ka's North Slope. It is the largest oil field in both the Unit­ed States and in North Amer­i­ca, cov­er­ing 213,543 acres (86,418 ha) and orig­i­nal­ly con­tain­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 25 bil­lion bar­rels (4.0×109 m3) of oil.[1] The amount of re­cov­er­able oil in the field is more than dou­ble that of the next largest field in the Unit­ed States, the East Texas oil field. The field is op­er­at­ed by BP; part­ners are Exxon­Mo­bil and Cono­coPhillips Alas­ka.