Drill Kit
Arctic Petroleum Development: Implications of Advances in Technology
By Terry R. Twyman
Congressional Research Service, 2001

Central to the case for allowing exploration and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is the argument that new technologies will allow industry to get the oil out with minimal damage to the landscape and the wildlife. It is likely that this line of reasoning will be unfurled once again this year, when Republican representatives and sena­tors are expected to pick up their battering ram and renew the charge at the gates of what has become the prize possession of the environmental lobby. The last assault, in March 2003, lost in the Senate, with 52 senators voting to delete from a larger bill a provision that could have opened the refuge for drilling.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is that 79,000-square-­kilometer slice of pristine wilderness or barren wasteland, depending upon whom one asks, east of Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope, the largest operating oil field in North America. This is a frozen land so out of the way that it attracts a mere 2,500 tourists a year. By comparison, tiny Sachuest Point National Wildlife Refuge in Rhode Island sees upwards of 65,000. Most of those who do visit ANWR come in the summer and head not for the plain, where the oil is, but 25 to 80 kilometers inland, where the mountains and the grizzlies are.