Editorial: Arctic oil could buy some time

Lately, Americans are feeling a lot of frustration at the gas pump. The rapidly-soaring price of fuel has affected many things: the price of food and some people’s jobs, to name a couple of issues that hit home.

In the remote northeast corner of Alaska is a place containing about 19 million acres called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, commonly referred to as ANWR. It is roughly the size of South Carolina. According to anwr.org, ANWR is not entirely a wildlife “refuge,” and only its southern portion of 9.16 million acres is officially classified as a refuge under the terms of the U.S. Wilderness Act of 1964.

The northerly portion of ANWR, on the Beaufort Sea, is a special area that has been set aside by Congress for oil and gas exploration. It is the Arctic Coastal Plain and is generally accepted by geologists to contain vast quantities of crude oil and natural gas deposits. With billions of barrels of recoverable oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas, the Coastal Plain is believed by some to rival or even exceed the initial capacity of nearby Prudhoe Bay.

The 800-mile-long Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), which for three decades has delivered oil from the Prudhoe Bay fields to southern Alaska, is within 100 miles of the Coastal Plain and could pose a solution for shipping the oil out of that region.

The engineering problems are daunting, but they are solvable. The tougher, long-term issues are the cultural and political ones. President Bush favors drilling in ANWR, but even he has commented that America is “addicted” to oil. That may be true, and in some cases addictions and bad habits are indeed best handled by going “cold turkey,” or complete and sudden withdrawal. However, it might be folly to assume the American public could endure such a change in outlook.

“Seward’s Folly” was a joke of the day when the United States purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867 for $7.2 million. The deal was the idea of then-U.S. Secretary of State William Seward, who was made the butt of jokes, perhaps most notably by Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune.

We hope America will not commit folly by ignoring yet-untapped rich pockets of oil and gas in northern Alaska. It is not a panacea, but it gives America some breathing space and some bargaining leverage at the crude global bazaar.

With some positive leadership and pragmatic political deals involving the president, Congress and other interested parties, including the state of Alaska, the indigenous inhabitants of northern Alaska and the oil companies, those resources in Alaska could be put to wise use in helping America to continue toward the necessary transition to a greater reliance on renewable energy sources.

In essence, ANWR could help buy some valuable time as America crosses a threshold into a new era of energy conservation and independence.

This editorial originally appeared in the Sierra Vista Herald, our sister newspaper, on July 9. It reflects the view of this newspaper.