Leaking on North Slope.

Byline: The Register-Guard

As the Bush administration nears its cherished goal of drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an industrial spill in a North Slope oil field last week offers a glimpse of what's in store for the wilderness home of caribou, snow geese and grizzlies.

A pipe leak discovered last Saturday at the Kuparuk oil field, the slope's second largest after Prudhoe Bay, released an estimated 111,300 gallons of ``produced water'' onto the frozen tundra. Produced water is water that has been separated from the mixture of crude oil and natural gas that comes out of oil wells.

It's a nasty accident, but there have been many nastier on the North Slope. In July 1989, nearly 39,000 gallons of crude oil were spilled. In March 1997, 758,000 gallons of diluted seawater were spilled. The latter doesn't sound particularly bad, but salt is every bit as devastating to delicate tundra plant life as crude oil.

Keep these and other industrial accidents in mind as the Bush administration and its congressional supporters argue that oil companies are capable of extracting millions of barrels of oil without damaging the refuge's fragile ecology or abundant wildlife.

Yes, oil extraction technology has improved. But don't believe for a second, as Interior Secretary Gale Norton recently wrote in The New York Times, that drilling would be confined to a tiny sliver of the refuge and that the pristine tundra - and the wildlife that live in it - would remain undisturbed.

Oil does not remove itself from the ground. It requires pumping stations, drilling platforms and hundreds of miles of pipelines. These facilities will not maintain themselves, and that means access roads, air strips and facilities where workers can live year round.

In 2003, a National Academy of Sciences study debunked the oil industry's claim that oil drilling and production in ANWR can be done with minimal damage. It showed that the impacts would extend far beyond the actual drilling zone and would cause significant damage to wildlife habitat.

Drilling in the refuge simply isn't worth the price. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that roughly 7 billion barrels of oil might be available - slightly less than the United States consumes each year. By 2020 or 2025, peak production might run as high as a million barrels a day, reducing foreign imports by a whopping 3 percentage points, according the administration's own analysis.

The American people understand that the refuge is the right place for wildlife and the wrong place for drilling. A recent Zogby International poll shows 55 percent oppose drilling in ANWR compared to 38 percent that support it.

Instead of succumbing to Bush's drive to drill in the refuge, Congress should instead start making the hard, necessary choices about conservation, transportation and new sources of energy. Even a modest bump in gasoline mileage standards on vehicles would conserve more oil each year than drilling in the refuge could ever yield.

Earlier this month, the Senate voted 51-49 to reject a bill that would have protected ANWR. The Senate will have at least one more chance to vote on drilling, and should reverse that narrow margin and protect for future generations one of the last true wildernesses on earth.