Oil Industry Sprawl on Alaska's North Slope

Since the Prudhoe Bay oil discovery in 1968, the oil industry has dramatically transformed a vast arctic wilderness. Prudhoe Bay and 18 other producing oil fields sprawl over more than 1,000 square miles of America's Arctic-- an area the size of Rhode Island. Today the North Slope oil fields include 3,893 exploratory and producing wells, 170 production and exploratory drill pads, 500 miles of roads, 1,100 miles of trunk and feeder pipelines, 2 refineries, many airports, many camps with living quarters for hundreds of workers, 5 docks and gravel causeways, and a total of 25 production plants, gas processing facilities, seawater treatment plants, and power plants. Many impacts exceed the Interior Department's predictions in a 1972 Trans-Alaska Pipeline EIS. Gravel mines extracted 400% more gravel. Oil companies drilled five times more wells. Road mileage was double. Gravel pads for drilling and oil facilities were predicted to cover 2,155 acres, but such infrastructure fills three times the area. Drilling proponents say that impacts will be small due to technological improvements. Despite advancements, there are unavoidable impacts from the latest North Slope oil development.

The industrial network continues to expand across the landscape each year with new drilling pads, roads, pipelines, processing plants, and other facilities and operations that add to the cumulative impact. Technological advances have reduced the size of individual drilling pads and some roads, but oil development unavoidably involves construction of many permanent industrial facilities and noisy operations spread across vast expanses of the landscape.

For example: Roughly 22,000 acres of tundra wetlands, floodplains, and other habitats have been directly lost due to the oil fields and Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. But the impacts to wildlife and their tundra habitats extend well beyond the sites of constructed facilities. A study of major landscape impacts due to the Prudhoe Bay oil fields in Science found that secondary effects such as hydrological changes to wetlands lagged behind construction and the total area eventually disturbed greatly exceeded direct impacts. "The extent of disturbance greatly exceeds the physical "footprint" of an oil-field complex," according to caribou biologists Nellemann and Cameron (1998). Many studies recorded decreased caribou densities within 4-km of pipelines and roads and regional changes in calving distribution for the Central Arctic Herd at Prudhoe Bay. Prudhoe Bay air emissions have been detected nearly 200 miles away in Barrow, Alaska.

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