After the Oil Rush: In Alaska, dwindling reserves forecast a statewide identity crisis.
After the Oil Rush - Charles Homans - the Atlantic
The culture of Alaska tends toward optimism. If this has something to do with the people who live there—now as ever a conglomeration of migrants, idealists, last-chancers, and get-rich-quick schemers—it also owes much to the state’s modern history. Alaska achieved statehood in 1959 in a kind of noble but dubious experiment: hobbled by geographic isolation, a near-absence of development, and a forbidding climate and landscape, the Last Frontier had no serious economic prospects to speak of. Then, nine years later, geologists found the largest known oil reserves in North America on the state’s North Slope, at Prudhoe Bay. By the time the 800-mile TransAlaska Pipeline System was completed, in 1977, connecting the North Slope to the southern port of Valdez, oil prices had spiked beyond all modern precedent. Alaska, only recently removed from its benighted territorial past, had become one of the richest states in the union.
But Alaskan optimism has its limits, and one morning in July, I went looking for them, driving out of downtown Valdez on a two-lane road that hugs the forested coast of Prince William Sound. The view was something out of a cruise-ship brochure: cottony skeins of fog caught on the tops of spruces, bald eagles picking through driftwood on the beach, a grizzly bear nosing around in the tall grass near the road while her cub stood on its hind legs sniffing the wind. Five miles, one background check, and one Secret Service-grade vehicle inspection later, a gate rumbled open and there it was: the end of the TransAlaska pipeline, the place where Alaska now enjoys the unique discomfort of watching its good fortune dripping away in real time, barrel by barrel.
The consortium of oil companies operating the drilling rigs off the Arctic coast has pumped some 12 billion barrels of oil from Prudhoe Bay. In 2007, a little more than 4 billion barrels were estimated to remain. Production is now a quarter of what it was in the field’s prime, when the Valdez docks received as many as 88 oil tankers a month; now they’re lucky to get one a day. The holding tanks in Valdez used to contain oil warm enough (it comes out of the earth at a steamy 110 degrees) to melt the 25 feet of snow that fall on their broad roofs each winter. But oil cools more quickly in an emptier pipeline, so in recent years, workers have had to scale the tanks with climbing harnesses and saws to carve off the snow in refrigerator-size blocks.
“Are we in a desperate position yet?” said Dave Cobb, Valdez’s mayor, when I visited him in his office earlier that morning. “No. But we need to be cognizant of what’s coming.”