Hunting for oil beneath the ice

There’s a new rush for petroleum from Alaska to the North Pole. Can ConocoPhillips and other energy giants find another Saudi Arabia under the ice?

… Right now we’re some 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and it’s so white outside that the distant horizon appears to blend seamlessly into the blustery sky.

The folks at Conoco surveyed this slice of barren land about a decade ago. But times are a bit desperate up here in North America’s largest oil region, and they’ve come back. “We’re looking to see if we left anything behind,” says Jim Darnall, an acquisition geophysicist for ConocoPhillips, as he brushes ice off his bushy gray beard. “We’re trying to milk this field anyway we can.”

Is this what America’s late-20th-century oil paradise has been reduced to – the petroleum equivalent of rooting for loose change in the cushions of a sofa? U.S. crude production is at its lowest since 1949, and nowhere has that decline been steeper than in Alaska, where oil output is less than half what it was a decade ago.

The fields that since the late 1970s have provided more than 20% of America’s oil are slowly running dry. It’s a phenomenon that is hardly limited to Alaska. The world’s five largest oil companies are replacing only 82% of the oil they pump each year, as once-prodigious fields fade and state entities in such countries as Venezuela and Russia consolidate ever more control over their oil and gas.

The combination of falling reserves and $100-plus oil is sparking a frenzy of oil and gas activity in Alaska the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the state’s initial oil boom more than three decades ago.

CNN