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No Refuge: The Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System and the Industrialization of the Arctic

Sat, March 17, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Riverside Convention Center, MR 8

Abstract

This paper argues the specific dynamics of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline system fueled extensive “upstream” exploration and production throughout the Arctic. For decades before the 1967 discovery of Prudhoe Bay, North America’s largest oilfield, oilmen and politicians sought to extract the petroleum riches of Alaska’s North Slope but ran into a perennial problem: the enormously expensive and environmentally-daunting challenge of transporting Arctic oil to market. The problem was ultimately solved by the construction of the world’s most expensive private-capital project, the eight-billion dollar Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. The realization of this Arctic artery forever altered the state of Alaska, the North Slope, and the global circumpolar environment.

With the anticipated construction of the pipeline, areas previously considered protected (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) or economically marginal (National Petroleum Reserve—Alaska) were suddenly viable for hydrocarbon development. The oil industry, the federal government, and the State of Alaska all utilized the new pipeline to secure new sources of petroleum, profits, and oil royalties beginning in the 1970s. Ultimately, throughout its forty-year operational history, the Pipeline inscribed a sprawling oil province the size of Delaware throughout the North Slope and is still extending its pervasive reach. The Alaska Pipeline remains America’s sole Arctic energy conduit and the lifeline of the Alaskan petro-state.

The example of the Alaska Pipeline exemplifies that fact that fossil-fuel infrastructures like pipelines provide the essential access which allows for sustained and expanded hydrocarbon extraction. Without a means to export Arctic oil, the vast North Slope oil fields would merely be potential reserves, rather than economic resources that return billions of dollars to Alaska and the petroleum industry. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System is America’s Arctic artery that has created its own particular path dependence and shows no signs of dissipating.

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