The villagers gave the first road a nickname: the “China wall"

December 23, 2015 10:32 AM

How Obama Let Big Oil Drill in the Pristine Alaska Wilderness. Alec MacGillis (of ProPublica) writing in Politico Magazine (Dec. 21, 2015), shows how one well-connected man (and big lobbying money) can really make a difference.

". . . doing it right meant protecting Teshekpuk Lake, at 30 miles wide the largest in the Alaskan Arctic. The lake happens to be smack in the middle of the part of NPR-A thought to have the richest oil fields, its northeastern corner. Yet this area is also so full of wildlife that it had long been considered inviolable . . .
Teshekpuk was the calving and summering grounds for a 60,000-head caribou herd. There were tundra swans that migrated to the Chesapeake Bay, buff-breasted sandpipers that headed for Argentina, yellow wagtails that wintered in Southeast Asia, and, trumping them all, bar-tailed godwits that flew 8,000 miles to New Zealand. Some 37,000 black brant geese, a large share of the global population, even molted at the lake."

. . .

"The company has also set in motion its next application for the reserve — Greater Mooses Tooth 2, linked to GMT-1 by another road, a slightly longer one. With the world facing an oil glut for the foreseeable future, causing major cutbacks for oil projects in the Lower 48, drilling will nonetheless proceed on some of the most pristine federal lands."

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Learn about Teshekpuk Lake

Teshekpuk Lake Observatory

Don't miss their wildlife photo gallery or their video gallery or their many live webcams.
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Wikipedia on the Native (Iñupiaq) Village of Nuiqsut, Alaska.

posted by spitbull (12 comments total)

America has built the equivalent of 10 Keystone pipelines since 2010 — and nobody said anything

While TransCanada Corp. has been cooling its heels on its Keystone XL proposal for the past six years, the oil pipeline business has been booming in the United States.

Crude oil pipeline mileage rose 9.1 per cent last year alone to reach 66,649 miles, according to data from the Washington, D.C.-based Association of Oil Pipe Lines (AOPL) set to be released soon.

Between 2009 and 2013, more than 8,000 miles of oil transmission pipelines have been built in the past five years in the U.S., AOPL spokesperson John Stoody said, compared to the 875 miles TransCanada wants to lay in the states of Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska for its 830,000-bpd project. By last year, the U.S. had built 12,000 miles of pipe since 2010.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 10:58 AM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

I thought the problem with Keystone was its route, not so much the concept of oil pipelines themselves.
posted by rhizome at 11:13 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

I thought the problem with Keystone was its route, not so much the concept of oil pipelines themselves.

I was under the impression the protests over Keystone XL were because of the visibility and politics around it, making it a good way to keep environmental issues in the news, not because it was that horrible of a pipeline (compared to the others). Since it crosses the US/Canada border it becomes a federal issue, and so it can be a proxy for a much larger conversation on the oil industry.
posted by selenized at 11:23 AM on December 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

It was a pipeline to make it cheaper for tar sands oil producers to move their product more cheaply, but tar sands production has an even worse carbon footprint than conventional oil extraction. That's my understanding of why Keystone was controversial: it was a financial subsidy to prop up an extraction method that otherwise wouldn't have been competitive. Also, the route for the planned pipeline ran through particular environmentally sensitive areas.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:01 PM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

I voted for him twice, but i will never speak of Obama as a good president for his inability to follow through on his promise to close Guantanamo and for allowing shit like this.
posted by OHenryPacey at 3:03 PM on December 23, 2015

The reporter fails to establish how Obama was involved in this decision or how he might have legally intervened. It appears that there was a defined permitting process for building the road that required an assessment by the Army Corps of engineers and the BLM; not the Whitehouse. ConnocoPhillips used the process to get its road built.
posted by humanfont at 9:48 PM on December 23, 2015

Greater Mooses Tooth-1 would cost $890 million

For an onshore well, even in Alaska? That seems really, really mind-blowingly high.
It seems as if that's the development cost, so what was the cost of the discovery well?

Not mentioned in the story is the fun fact that you can now use seismic on the North Slope because the permafrost is melting, and further inland, south of Prudhoe Bay, they're trying to prove the HRZ shale is as good, or even better than the Eagle Ford Shale.
posted by Mezentian at 11:07 PM on December 23, 2015

Since [Keystone XL] crosses the US/Canada border it becomes a federal issue, and so it can be a proxy for a much larger conversation on the oil industry.

Also, from a Canadian or Albertan perspective it doesn't make a whole lot of economic sense to ship all that expensively-produced bitumen to the Gulf Coast for refining just because they have excess capacity. Unless you're the Koch brothers, apparently.
posted by sneebler at 11:42 AM on December 24, 2015

it doesn't make a whole lot of economic sense to ship all that expensively-produced bitumen to the Gulf Coast for refining

What do you do with it? I thought it was impossible to refine it in BC or Alberta, so you'd have to send it to Montreal/Quebec?

Can't leave all that dangerous pollution in the ground!
posted by Mezentian at 2:27 PM on December 24, 2015

The Company Behind Keystone XL Now Wants $15 Billion From US Taxpayers

TransCanada Sues the U.S. for $15B for Rejecting Keystone XL. Will This Be the New Normal Under TPP?
posted by homunculus at 5:08 PM on January 7, 2016

TransCanada Sues the U.S. for $15B for Rejecting Keystone XL. Will This Be the New Normal Under TPP?

It was the new normal before the TPP.
posted by Mezentian at 9:31 PM on January 7, 2016

It was the new normal before the TPP.

These kinds of lawsuits were and are common under NAFTA, which facilitates them.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:09 PM on January 7, 2016