"South" to Alaska

Anchorage and Prudhoe Bay, November, 1984

Alaska may be big and empty, but Anchorage is big and crowded. At least it was when I visited it, in September of 1984. This came as quite a shock. I really did not know what to expect. The flight from Seattle is long and beautiful on a clear day, with glimpses from afar of the snow-capped mountains that line the British Columbia coast and then the Alaskan Panhandle. Looking at a map, the enormity of the fiftieth state (check) is awesome. As the plane makes its approach to Anchorage airport, fabulous Cook Inlet and the Kenai Peninsula, with many islands jutting out of the sea here and there, makes a spectacular first impression.

The airport itself provides the first clue that if this is indeed the Arctic, it is also the south brought north. The main terminal is big and chock full of planes, not just because Anchorage is the gateway to Alaska, but also because Anchorage is on the Great Circle Route: airlines stop here for refuelling and change of crew on their way to and from Asia. Ten years after my first visit, for instance, a flight I was on from Toronto to Hong Kong made a stop in Anchorage, at precisely the halfway point in our eighteen hour journey. The second thing one noticed about Alaska on the ground was the omnipresence of military aircraft. At the height of the Cold War, Alaska was armed to the teeth against the Soviet Union, which lay a short distance across the Aleutian Islands. The state also served as a key listening post as to Russian military activity.

Alaska conjures up images of many things, not the least of which is Kodiak bears, salmon runs and huskies. But what really drives Alaska these days is oil; and that is what brought me there. Oil is what really built Anchorage. Not only did oil bring jobs and people, but it also meant that the native land claim was settled along with it. This settlement provided large amounts of money to native peoples in Alaska, including the Inupiat of the North Slope ( check). Oil is of course a mixed blessing for Alaska, as the notorious 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound amply demonstrated.

When I was there in the mid-eighties, Anchorage looked like an average North American city of a few hundred thousand people. In fact, it reminded me a lot of a mini-Calgary, with its neat, grid layout of downtown streets, its functionality, and its lack of warmth: nice to look at, but rather unappealing otherwise. The mountains in the background do, however, provide a magnificent backdrop, especially when set against the broad expanse of Cook Inlet to the west.

One day was all that was needed to visit the oil installations of Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope, some 500 miles ( check ) and a three hour jet flight away. Flying over Denali ( aka Mt. McKinley (sp) and the Richardson Mountains, one suddenly realises what an incredible engineering feat it was to have built the TAPS, or Trans Alaska Pipeline, all the way from the North Slope terminal at Prudhoe Bay to the southern Alaskan port of Valdez, made famous by a drunken ARCO tanker captain who led his ship onto the rocks one fateful April day in 1989, causing tremendous damage to the environment, not to mention EXXON’s pocketbook.

Prudhoe Bay is a company town belonging to ARCO ( Atlantic Richfield Company ) and BP, the two main Alaskan North Slope producers. Their installations are impressive for their size, and for how they manage to make one feel that one is nowhere near the Arctic. In fact, when one is inside these facilities, one might as well be in Libya or the Persian Gulf, for all the local flavour. People come here to work, they do their job, and they go south on leave, to be replaced by someone else. They are part of the global oil culture.

Prudhoe Bay owes its existence to the OPEC crisis of 1974, when the US government decided it did not want to hold itself hostage to Arab oil interests any longer. The EXXON Valdez spill could hae been averted had the authorities accepted one of the original plans, which was to transport the oil overland through northern Canada and down into the southern forty-eight. However, the security implications of this transportation route were deemed to be too risky at the time, and so the TAPS was built to take the oil to Valdez and from there to Washington state and California by supertanker ( as if this transportation system did not in itself pose large enough threats to American security!). The plan to push ahead with Alaskan oil development also led to the settlement of native land claims in Alaska: the whole process is eloquently described in Thomas Berger’s Village Journey. Moreover, the extremely dangerous nature of supertanker transport is brilliantly and chillingly exposed in Eric Nalder’sTankers Full of Trouble.

Alaskan oil will not last forever. Vast amounts are thought to exist in the ANWR near the Yukon border; if developed these and other, offshore reserves could prolong the lifespan of TAPS. But sooner or later the state and the US at large is going to have to find a replacement. Even now, Alaskan oil only accounts for approximately ten percent of American consumption, and, ironically, the United States is today far more dependent on foreign oil than it was when the lights went out back in 1974. Of course, the global geopolitical situation has changed dramatically in the past two decades.