NUIQSUT, Alaska — Rising from the tundra on Alaska’s North Slope lies a million-pound drilling rig pulling the first commercial oil from a reserve set aside nearly a century ago.
ConocoPhillips is the first oil company to draw crude from the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an area the size of Indiana that President Warren G. Harding dedicated as an emergency oil supply for the Navy in 1923.
Getting to this point took compromises with Alaska Natives while keeping environmental concerns in mind.
The Bureau of Land Management, which controls the reserve, in 2013 identified 12 million acres that could be available for development while setting aside 11 million acres to protect wild animals and grazing lands.
The drilling rig began pulling up oil in October. At peak production, it will produce 16,000 barrels a day from the Colville-Delta 5 field, or as it’s more commonly known, CD5. It also will serve as a launch pad for nearby fields in Alaska’s Arctic.
The Colville-Delta 5 field is an extension of ConocoPhillips’ Alpine field, about 5 miles to the east.
“We’ve spent more than a dozen years trying to achieve the permits to do the development, to complete the development,” Jim Brodie, the capital projects manager for ConocoPhillips in the reserve, said of the $1 billion project this week. “It’s a sizable investment.”
The oil is being drilled on surface land owned by Kuukpik Corp., an Alaska Native village corporation for the nearby community of Nuiqsut, about 25 miles south of the Arctic Ocean, or 625 miles north of Anchorage.
Village residents who live a subsistence lifestyle objected to the original plans for one of the bridges over the Colville River to the oilfield, worried that it might interfere with fishing access. Brodie said ConocoPhillips pulled its permit package to come up with an alternate plan.
Nicole Whittington-Evans, Alaska regional director for The Wilderness Society, said her group has been mostly concerned with how the development will proceed: Will it involve roads or not? How far westward will the sprawl continue?
“Those are the types of things that we’re concerned about right now, and we have focused on trying to ensure that the least environmentally damaging developments move forward,” she said.
