2:52 PM LINK
Mainly on the Plains
map from Anchorage Daily News site (click map to enlarge)
The name Section 1002 of ANWR (the area that would be opened for drilling) refers to the numbered section of the 1980 law (called ANILCA) that eased the restrictions on drilling in the refuge.
If you oppose drilling, you might suspect that Section 1002 is just the opening round of a push to drill in the entire refuge. But this is not true at all.
Why drill in Section 1002 and not the rest of the refuge? Because that's where the oil is, of course. But why is it there, geologically speaking?
Section 1002 is important because it is the exactly the part of the wildlife refuge consisting of the coastal plain. The southern boundary of the section coincides with the northern limit of the Brooks Range, which runs across northern Alaska.
map from
this site
Why drill in the just coastal plains? It has a lot to do with how oil accumulates. Back in the Creatceous Era, the shallow inland sea that covered much of the Great Plains actually extended all the way up to the Arctic Ocean and covered northern Alaska. The marine sediment from this time is what lead to the current petroleum deposits.
By why just on the coast? Simply put, because you don't find oil in the mountains. This applies even if the mountains were formed after the original oil deposits were created.
Why? Because after the petroleum molecules are produces by the cracking of the large organic molecules into hydrocarbons by underground pressure, the must migrate and accumulate in source rock.
To accumulate into a drillable reservoir, petroleum needs the right kind of underground geology. Typically this involves slight gentle breakages in the underground sedimentary layers, combined with a moderate tilting of the layers to create what is known as angular unconformities.
But when mountains are created, the sedimentary layers typically get tilted too much, creating too many "escape hatches" for the oil molecules.
This is why you don't mind oil in mountains, in most cases. Often you can find it in nearby plateaus and plains (as in Wyoming, for example), but rarely on the mountainside itself.
On the other hand, a coast plain is perfect for trapping the oil. Although it might not look like it on the surface, underground, there may be the right kind of layer geometry to create excellent deposits.
map from this site, showing the coast plain of ANWR, with caribou herd concentrations in red.
This is why there is probably no pertroleum in ANWR outside of the coastal plain, which is basically synonymous with Section 1002. At least in this case, Section 1002 is not a Green Domino for opening up the rest of refuge.
2:40 AM LINK
An Emotional Alaskan
The last couple days, I've been following the ANWR debate in the Senate on CSPAN. Not the whole thing, mind you--just when I'm flipping through the channels. Senator Murkowski is on camera about half the time, it seems.
Last year I saw Murkowski on CSPAN asking questions to the head of the U.S. Forest Service on a committee panel. He's definitely a "blamer," the type of conservative who passionately asserts that everything that is wrong with the country is the fault of people with whom he disagrees.
But with ANWR, he seems to have actually toned down a bit. Probably it's because he realizes that he can't let it all hang out if he really wants to sway anyone's mind on this. Is that what they do in Congress? Sway people's minds?
Or maybe it's that he's so tired from being on camera on the time.
Like all the Senators, he has an aide who continually changes the posters on an easel while he talks. In the little bit I saw today, he was talking about wind farms.
He made a point that I have long since come to agree with: wind farms are ugly. If you believe in any sense that oil exploration will mar the landscape, how it possible to advocate wind farming?
His poster displayed this factoid: the "2000 acres" of ANWR will produce one million barrels of crude oil per day. In contrast, the 1,500 acres of the wind farm near Palm Springs in Southern California has an average power output that is the equivalent of about one thousand barrels of oil per day.
The message: oil gets you one thousand times as much power with less marring of the land.
Of course, wind doesn't generate carbon pollution.
Later, flipping through again. I saw Jim Jeffords of Vermont on camera. His posters explained how the U.S. was lagging far behind other countries in the deployment of renewable energy.
So much good juicy debate going on right now. Nothing about it the major media. I wish I could watch the whole dang thing.
