From oil-patch Alaska, next comes the gas pipe

KUPARUK, Alaska — Here on the North Slope, the land flat as Nebraska but fat with oil, summer means 20-plus hours of sunlight and mosquitoes, but also a chance to look at what the fuss is about, politically, environmentally and financially.

ConocoPhillips Petroleum brings in a daily 737 flight onto a dirt airstrip, sailing past miles of pipeline and the blue-green of tundra covered with a million shallow lakes. Up close, the feeder pipelines that lead to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline down to Valdez and into our West Coast gas tanks are lines checkerboarding the land, like a crossword puzzle on a blank page.

A few, stray caribou sit under the pipelines, Arctic birds are white against the gray sky. Stepping on the fragile tundra is not allowed without a permit, so it's by mud-covered van or short walks along the dirt roads that oil-patch Alaska emerges from conflicting emotions to reality.

The petroleum imprint on the land is enormous. Twelve miles of roads and pipe between processing plants; a desalinization plant on the lip of the Beaufort Sea with an anti-bear cage to protect people going out to the parking lot; 3,000 men and women working on 24 oilfields. All of it churning 24 hours a day.

The North Slope is larger than Idaho — 88,000 square miles, with 312 square miles developed, according to the oil companies — but no one can say that the footprint on the tundra is soft or without consequences.

This oilfield at Kuparuk, like its neighbors along Prudhoe Bay, is draining away, but the price of oil compensates for less production. The 800-mile pipeline to Valdez is well under capacity, but even between 800,000 and 900,000 barrels a day — every day — Thursday's $73.89 a barrel crude price is an enormous cash cow. The value of petroleum production from 1959 to 2002 is calculated by the state of Alaska at $350 billion, but the high point was 1981 and the volume has been declining ever since.

Unlike the Beverly Hillbillies, there is no bubbling crude, only oil-soaked rock and mud way down, well past 2,000 feet of permafrost into the 11,000- to 13,000-foot depths. No Beverly Hillbillies, but a lot of Oklahoma accents and more baseball caps in the 24-hour cafeteria than in the major leagues.

Many men and women work two weeks on, two weeks off; some pick three weeks on and three weeks off. It's 24/7 with free billeting, two squares a day, plus unlimited sandwiches, soft drinks, fruit and snacks. Average wage is $96,000 a year, according to Alaska Economic Trends.

Working here has the quality of a sci-fi movie, the eerie sense of isolation with the constant clank of machinery. At night, there is no night. In winter, it is 40 or 50 degrees below zero and always night.

The fierce Arctic National Wildlife Refuge debate is more symbolic here than tangible. Instead, engineers are probing for oil constantly, going deep and sideways through the Earth, and sometimes coming up dry but maximizing the current fields. The hot issue — one that politicians in the Northwest may be able to support — is the proposed natural gas pipeline from the North Slope through Alaska and Canada to the Midwest. The North Slope is 250 miles inside the Arctic Circle — 1,300 miles from the North Pole. But it is even farther to Chicago, where natural gas from the North Slope may be headed.

A $20 billion project that would lay a buried gas line from Prudhoe Bay through Alberta to Chicago is supported by the big-three players on the North Slope — ConnocoPhillips, BP and ExxonMobil. They all have merged names and shared projects now.

Promising Alaskans $1 million a day in revenue, the gas pipe is clearly seen as the next big thing for the North Slope and energy supplies. And of course, big ideas are the way things work up here.

I saw professionals working hard on the North Slope in some of the most remote conditions on Earth. It didn't change my mind a whit about drilling in ANWR. We don't need to drill inside the refuge unless and until we get a grip on how much energy we are consuming.

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com