Empire of Ice

      On a $500 million man-made island in the frozen Arctic Ocean, just off the coast of a vast, uninhabitable tundra known as Alaska’s North Slope, a pipeline begins. In temperatures that hover around forty-five degrees below zero, in perpetual darkness, a tight-knit band of roughnecks spends twelve hours a day, seven days a week, drilling down, down into the earth and pulling up precious crude. If you want to know how badly we need oil, here is your answer

The island is named Oooguruk, an Inupiaq word meaning “bearded seal,” an animal plentiful on the shores of Alaska’s North Slope. The Slope is where the Trans-Alaska Pipeline starts, where the crude gets pumped up from more than a mile inside the earth, then gets sent on the 800-mile journey south to Valdez, Alaska, where the pipeline ends and tankers come and load the crude up and deliver it down the coast. There, in places like northern Washington and Long Beach, California, it gets processed into the fuel America now so grudgingly remembers makes the world go round.


People have known for thousands of years that oil was abundant on Alaska’s North Slope, a vast tundra, flat and treeless, on and on and on, from the foothills of the Brooks Mountain Range to the Arctic Ocean, an endless, unchanging landscape bigger than Idaho. For centuries native Eskimos cut blocks of oil-soaked tundra from natural seeps to use as fuel. In the 1920s, explorers arrived and began poking holes. In 1968 they discovered Prudhoe Bay State No. 1, the largest oil field in North America and one of the largest in the world, and a year later the adjacent Kuparuk field, the second-largest. Today, five of our ten largest oil fields are on Alaska’s North Slope, where twenty-four separate fields pump out about 16 percent of our total domestic oil supply.

A person can’t just drive around the North Slope, visit the locals, stop in at a burger joint. There are no locals, no burger joints, no houses, no cities, no churches. The gateway to the oil fields is the town of Deadhorse, where the airport is, and where security restricts passage to anyone but workers who fly in and get bused to camps for two-week hitches.

It took nearly a year for me to gain access to the Slope. The corporate giants who control the fields—BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil—have little to gain from public scrutiny. Rarely do stories of Alaska’s oil emerge unless there is a freak accident to talk about—the odd spill, usually set against a snowy backdrop featuring a winsome caribou looking dismayed about the greedy nature of the human race. But Pioneer Natural Resources—the company that built the island, where TooDogs is in charge of the rig and Kung Fu plays the fiddle and Turtle fake-hates Jason for lying to him about being married to a stripper named Onyx—was willing to allow me in. Pioneer is the first independent operator to produce oil on the Slope, a market cornered by the three majors for its entire history. In many ways, it represents a glimmer of hope. Everyone knows the oil up here is running out; production is declining 6 percent a year, down from an all-time high of 2 million barrels a day in 1988 to 700,000 today. But everyone also knows the oil isn’t really running out—it’s just a lot harder to get to. It is a common story in the saga of natural resources, whether you are talking coal or gas or oil: The big companies suck out the easy, vast reservoirs, and then in come the little companies nimble enough to pick away at the leftovers.

The ongoing debate over whether or not we should be drilling for oil in Alaska—onward to ANWR to the east—typically leaves out one factor: We are drilling for oil in Alaska, every hour of every day for the past thirty years, drilling in some of the most extreme conditions on earth, where the windchill can easily reach minus ninety-eight degrees, so cold that you have to leave your pickup running twenty-four hours a day or you’ll never get it started again, where it is pitch dark for nearly two months each winter, where people live without families, without homes, without access to so much of what most of us think of when we think of what it means to be human.

by Jeanne Marie Laskas, GQ (2008) |  Source