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Oil backers seek roads over Alaska's tundra
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) -- Supporters of oil development in Alaska have for years praised temporary ice roads that melt in the summer as a way of minimizing the impact of petroleum extraction on the fragile tundra. Using roads carved out of ice and snow to carry drilling equipment and other related traffic, they claim, help make it environmentally safe to explore for oil in northeastern Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a controversial proposal that is the cornerstone of President Bush's energy policy. But with oil drilling poised to expand elsewhere on Alaska's North Slope, development backers are seeking a more permanent method of travel -- old-fashioned permanent gravel roads. Gov. Frank Murkowski wants the state to build a 123-mile road loop connecting Prudhoe Bay, the potentially gas-rich Brooks Range foothills and Nuiqsut, an Inupiat Eskimo village of 440 people that is 60 miles west of the trans-Alaska pipeline and on the border of the federal National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Supporters say the road loop, to include a bridge spanning the wildlife-rich Colville River, would facilitate new oil development on public lands there. State officials in March issued a draft plan for the project. A final plan is due in July, and Murkowski has asked the Legislature for $5 million to start engineering work. Creation of jobs promisedIt is one of the Republican governor's top transportation priorities, a state official said. "If we get the roads into these resource-rich areas, it develops resources and it creates a lot of jobs," said John MacKinnon, deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities. Separately, ConocoPhillips and Anadarko Petroleum, partners in the Alpine oil field near Nuiqsut, want to multiply the miles of gravel road there. Under their plan, the three miles within the Alpine field could grow to about 30 miles radiating out to satellite oil discoveries, including deposits recently found in the National Petroleum Reserve. Alpine, the North Slope's westernmost producing oil field, pumps out about 100,000 barrels a day. ConocoPhillips' and Anadarko's proposed satellite drill sites include what would be the first commercial production from the federal reserve.
New gravel roads would do much to stimulate oil development, said Judy Brady, executive director of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association. "If you're 60 miles from any place, you really have to have a huge find in order to make it pay," she said. A discovery close to a permanent road could be much smaller and still be economic, she said. But to environmentalists, plans for building permanent roads show that past claims about environmentally friendly ice roads and low-impact oil fields were hollow. "The 'small footprint' has always been a myth," said Peter Van Tuyn of Trustees for Alaska, an Anchorage-based environmental law firm. Already, nearly 600 miles of gravel roads are etched on the tundra in and around the oil fields. Those roads "have had effects as far-reaching and complex as any physical component of the North Slope oil fields," said a March report by the National Research Council. To avoid collapsing into permafrost layer that turns spongy in the summer, the roads must be elevated on a thick bed of gravel or other insulating material. Report: Water flow altered, affecting wildlifeBut the layers, up to 6 feet thick, become dams for water that usually flows from the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean, the National Research Council report said. Drainage and snowdrift patterns are altered, and wildlife habitat has been submerged by roadside flooding, it said. Vehicle traffic on gravel roads kicks up dust that coats vegetation, disturbing the tundra's thermal balance, the report said. And gravel to construct the roads must be excavated from somewhere -- usually the beds of area creeks and rivers that are important habitat for fish and wildlife, the report said. More North Slope oil development inevitably will mean gravel road pads, noisy aircraft traffic and increasing extraction of scarce freshwater, along with spreading roads, Van Tuyn said. But industry supporters say the use of gravel roads is appropriate. Ice roads are "wonderful inventions," but they have limitations, said Larry Houle, general manager of the Alaska Support Industry Alliance, a trade group of oil-field contractors. "Ice roads cost $500,000 a mile, and they melt," Houle said. "We're going to have to get rid of the idea that we don't need roads." Warmer weather a problemWarming weather on the North Slope also makes reliance on ice roads difficult. In 1970, weather was cold and snowy enough to allow safe tundra travel on ice roads for more than 200 days of the year, according to the Alaska Department of Natural Resources. Now that period of safe tundra travel is little more than half as long, according to department statistics. North Slope residents have mixed feelings about the road proposals. Some welcome the idea of a ground link for isolated villagers who depend on costly air travel. Some worry about habitat degradation and other possible ill effects. New roads could bring outside hunters, trash-dumping drivers and other headaches, said Tom Lohman, attorney for the North Slope Borough, the Minnesota-size local government district along the Arctic coastline. "If Ma and Pa RV goes off the road, it's the borough's search-and-rescue that has to respond," Lohman said. Copyright 2003 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Ice roads cost $500,000 a mile, and they melt. We're going to have to get rid of the idea that we don't need roads.
