Friday, March 18, 2005
Fossil fuel dependence, abandoned treaties, environmental damage
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
±
Sovacool, a graduate research assistant,
is a research analyst for the Consortium on Energy Restructuring in the Department of Science and Technology Studies
at Virginia Tech.
Contrary to claims from the Bush administration and oil and gas executives, allowing energy development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will harm the environment, compromise international law, erode the social significance of wilderness protection and ultimately do little to increase the energy security of the United States.
This has not stopped the administration from moving forward with plans for development, which call for the construction of refineries, pipelines and transportation corridors in the "1002" area of the refuge in the north near Camden Bay.
Sen. Pete Domenici, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, narrowly pushed through a bill on Wednesday that permits oil and natural gas exploration on the refuge's 1.5 million-acre coastal plain.
From any perspective - environmental, legal, social and political - such a move is a grave mistake. Studies by the National Academy of Science, World Bank and numerous ecologists confirm that the operation of these refineries will release discharged solids, drilling waste and dirty diesel fuel into the ecosystem's food chain, as they have from oil operations in Prudhoe Bay.
The fugitive emissions and flares from these facilities will create acidification and induce localized climate change, and the corridors needed to accommodate refineries will disrupt the migration of large animals, accelerate thermokarst and fundamentally alter predation patterns, water purity and soil chemistry.
The Arctic environment is especially sensitive to these changes because the ecosystem operates on a simplified food chain with slower rates of photosynthesis and decomposition.
Less obvious but equally important, oil and gas exploration in ÂANWR will violate a number of international treaties on biodiversity protection. The 1987 Caribou Agreement, which the United States signed with Canada, protects the Porcupine Caribou herds that migrate from the Yukon to the Alaskan coastal plane.
The Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears - signed with Canada, Denmark, Norway and the former Soviet Union in 1973 - and various migratory bird conventions signed with Russia, Japan, Canada and Mexico also explicitly forbid development within the refuge.
Abrogating these protocols will result in required restitution for damages that could total in the millions of dollars. They will also ruin the credibility of the United States on environmental issues, leadership needed to end pressing problems such as deforestation in Brazil, desertification in Sudan and soil erosion in Sri Lanka.
In addition, development in ÂANWR will threaten the concept of wilderness protection. By making wilderness refuge protections conditional, oil and gas exploration would transform the landscape of ANWR from a social symbol attentive and humbling to one degraded and exploitable. As forester Aldo Leopold remarked in 1947, "Wilderness is a resource which can shrink, but cannot grow."
Compromising this ethic weakens the protection of other unaltered tracts of wilderness in the United States, thus eroding the scientific value these ecosystems offer for understanding global warming, patch dynamics, biology, geology and ecology.
Ironically, oil and gas development will do little to end U.S. dependence on foreign sources of energy. One oil executive recently remarked that, at best, oil production in ANWR would achieve between 600,000 and 1.5 million barrels of oil per day at its peak.
According to a 2003 Energy Information Administration report, the United States consumes an average of 19.7 million barrels of oil per day. Department of Energy estimates reached a similar conclusion, commenting that oil production in ANWR would likely reduce oil imports from 62 percent to 60 percent.
And Lord Browne, the CEO of BP-Amoco, testified before Congress that increased oil production in the Gulf of Mexico and expansion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve offset the need to drill in ANWR for oil and natural gas.
The problems don't stop there. Instead of improving energy security, a Union of Concerned Scientists report concluded, oil refineries, pipelines and tankers represent significant security risks because they offer targets for terrorism.
A number of scholars and organizations, including the International Energy Agency, Congressional Budget Office and Environmental Protection Agency, have argued that decentralizing energy production through distributed generation and renewable technologies such as fuel cells, photovoltaic systems and wind turbines offers the best way to enhance power-grid security.
These types of technologies minimize the risk of fuel shocks, interruptions and shortages because they diversify the types of fuel used to generate electricity, reduce the number of concentrated targets on the grid and insulate the energy sector should an incident occur.
In contrast, drilling in ANWR continues business as usual. It relies on oil and natural gas refineries to create energy and the transportation of combustible material over long distances, as well as continuing U.S. dependency on oil and natural gas as primary fuels.
As Athan Manuel of the Arctic Wilderness Campaign put it, "Drilling in ANWR is no substitute to better energy policy."
Finally, the use of "environmentally friendly" techniques such as directional drilling, ice roads and multilateral wells will not protect the Arctic environment. The Congressional Research Service concluded that the use of ice roads would not be suitable for the "1002" area because of its seasonal temperature changes and hilly terrain.
Newer refining technology also extracts petrocarbons more rapidly to better react to economic conditions, making them more dangerous to operate. And better techniques still require roads, power plants, drilling pads, processing facilities, loading docks, dormitories, airstrips, gravel pits, utility lines, storage facilities and landfills.
For these collective reasons, Congress should reinstate protections for the refuge that explicitly prevent oil and gas exploration.
