The Department of Interior released an updated analysis of fossil fuel leases today, finding that more than two thirds of offshore leases and half of onshore leases are sitting idle — “neither producing nor under active exploration.”

The report, “Oil and Gas Lease Utilization, Onshore and Offshore Updated Report to the President,” explained that oil and gas companies hold thousands of undeveloped leases. Despite holding these inactive leases, the oil industry continues to demand the opening of new, previously protected federal lands and waters areas to drilling.

The report found that:

More than 70 percent of the tens of millions of offshore acres currently under lease are inactive, neither producing nor currently subject to approved or pending exploration or development plans. Out of nearly 36 million acres leased offshore, only about 10 million acres are active – leaving nearly 72 percent of the offshore leased area idle.

In the lower 48 states, an additional 20.8 million acres, or 56 percent of onshore leased acres, remain idle. Furthermore, there are approximately 7,000 approved permits for drilling on federal and Indian lands that have not yet been drilled by companies.

According to the Energy Information Administration, total federal oil production (offshore and onshore) has increased by 13 percent during the first three years of the Obama administration combined, compared with the last three years of the previous administration. According to independent analysis, the total number of active rigs operating on the U.S. outer continental shelf was higher in January 2012 than any time since May 2010.

The American Petroleum Institute – Big Oil’s lobbying arm — claims that the Department of Interior ignores exploratory work on leases; however, that is clearly included in DOI’s assessment above.

API recently demanded that the Obama Administration open up the North Atlantic to “seismic exploration” for oil. This is an area that supports vital American fisheries.

In addition to holding thousands of undeveloped leases while lobbying to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, off the New England Coast, and in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, the big five oil companies produced 12 percent less oil in 2011 than in 2006 — all while making record profits.

Daniel J. Weiss is Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The CBO report reviewed different policies intended to make the country more energy secure, concluding that the only effective tool for shielding businesses and consumers from price spikes is to use less oil.

Because oil is sold on the global market, CBO concludes that increasing domestic oil production would do little to influence rising gas prices in the U.S.

These findings back up historical experience. According to an analysis of 36 years of gasoline prices and domestic oil production conducted by the Associated Press, there is zero statistical correlation between increased drilling and lower prices at the gas pump.

The CBO report creates a dilemma for drilling proponents. Even if increased drilling did substantially lower gas prices — which it has not –  the agency says those lower prices would actually make the country less secure from price shocks:

Policies that promoted greater production of oil in the United States would probably not protect U.S. consumers from sudden worldwide increases in oil prices stemming from supply disruptions elsewhere in the world, even if increased production lowered the world price of oil on an ongoing basis. In fact, such lower prices would encourage greater use of oil, thus making consumers more vulnerable to increases in oil prices. Even if the United States increased production and became a net exporter of oil, U.S. consumers would still be exposed to gasoline prices that rose and fell in response to disruptions around the world.

In contrast, policies that reduced the use of oil and its products would create an incentive for consumers to use less oil or make decisions that reduced their exposure to higher oil prices in the future, such as purchasing more fuel-efficient vehicles or living closer to work. Such policies would impose costs on vehicle users (in the case of fuel taxes or fuel-efficiency requirements) or taxpayers (in the case of subsidies for alternative fuels or for new vehicle technologies). But the resulting decisions would make consumers less vulnerable to increases in oil prices.

The solution is clear: the only way to make America more energy secure is to use less energy.

Even Mitt Romney understood this in 2007 when he admitted that “these high gasoline prices are probably here to stay” and advocated 50-mpg fuel efficiency standards, public transportation, electric vehicles, and renewable alternatives.

However, today, Romney champions opening up virtually every possible area of the U.S. to oil drilling — disingenuously claiming it will make consumers more secure.

“The best thing we can do to get the price of gas to be more moderate and not have to be dependent upon the cartel is: drill in the gulf, drill in the outer continent shelf, drill in ANWR, drill in North Dakota, South Dakota, drill in Oklahoma and Texas,” Romney said at a recent campaign stop.

Even as the analysis piles up showing that increased domestic drilling is not an effective solution to high gas prices or energy security, political leaders continue to repeat these false claims.

We need creative, proven ideas to help us make America more efficient and less dependent on oil — not a hollow Drill-Baby-Drill mantra that does nothing to address the problem.

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by Tom Kenworthy

The Environmental Protection Agency today took an important step toward reducing the harmful health effects of air pollution from oil and gas drilling operations.

The agency issued new rules that will require companies to capture emissions of toxic chemicals, compounds that contribute to smog, and methane, a potent global warming gas.

In a significant concession to the oil and gas industry, which has lobbied furiously to water down the requirements, the agency extended the time for full implementation to nearly three years, setting a limit of January 2015. By that final 2015 deadline, companies must have equipment in place to capture emissions through so-called “green completions.” Prior to the deadline companies will be able to flare or burn escaping gas and chemicals.

Gina McCarthy, assistant EPA administrator for air and radiation, said the change in the compliance deadline came when EPA determined it would take time for industry to get the technology in place for capturing emissions and to train personnel.

“We took a look at the data. There does need to be time for equipment to be manufactured, for training to be conducted…. This is a reasonable step…. It wasn’t politically motivated.”

EPA rejected industry appeals to limit the rules only to wells emitting high levels of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs.

The proposed rules include the first federal standards for hydraulic fracturing operations. The rules will cover the estimated 13,000 U.S. wells that are hydraulically fractured or re-fractured each year, and apply to various parts of the oil and gas development process, from well completion to processing.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a controversial practice that injects a high pressure mixture of water, sand and chemicals into underground rock formations where gas and oil is trapped. These new rules could result in a significant reduction of methane leaks during well completions. The prime component of natural gas, methane is more than 20 times more potent a global warming gas than carbon monoxide.

EPA officials estimate that the regulations will cut smog-forming and toxic chemicals now released during well development by 95%, and cut about about a quarter — or 540,000 tons — of the industry’s overall release of VOCs. The oil and gas sector is the largest industrial emitter of VOCs, spewing some 2.2 million tons a year in 2009.

The rules require the use of an already proven technology to capture emissions released during “flowback,” a three to 10 day period when water, fluids, gas and chemicals rush to the surface after drilling is completed.

The flowback mixture usually includes lots of VOCs, methane and hazardous chemicals like benzene. The capturing technologies, known as green completions, are already required in Colorado and Wyoming. The EPA estimates that the industry will actually save $11 million to $19 million a year through the sale of captured gas.

A separate part of the new rules package will cut chemical emissions of toxic chemicals during transport and production of natural gas by imposing new standards on compressors, controllers, storage tanks and gas processing plants.

EPA also estimates the rules will cut methane releases by 26 percent and air toxics by almost 30 percent.

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Many experts, though, have pointed out that its not for a lack of drilling that oil prices are increasing, but rampant speculation in oil markets. Michael Greenberger, a former regulator at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) who oversaw the futures markets, told McClatchy that the increase is due to “excessive speculation” on the part of Wall Street:

“It is similar to the gambling Wall Street did on whether or not people would pay their subprime (below-market rate) mortgages in the mortgage meltdown,” said Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland and a former federal regulator of financial markets. “Now they are betting on the upward direction of the price of oil” … “It is excessive speculation, which is a fancy word for saying that gamblers wearing Wall Street suits have taken these markets over,” he said.

Back in February, oil prices cracked $100 per barrel despite the lowest demand since 1997.

The Obama administration has said that it will crack down on excessive oil speculation, but it’s oil speculation task force has hardly done anything at all. The CFTC, meanwhile, has been slow to implement new rules designed to rein in speculators that were a part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Democrats have been pushing the agency to begin that enforcement.

Watch:

– Fatima Najiy

Nearly a year after its creation, though, the task force has met “only a handful of times” and has yet to issue any public reports, McClatchy reports:

The Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group has met only four or five times since its creation last April 21, and most of those meetings came at the time of its inception. Back then, Obama promised that the group would “root out any cases of fraud or manipulation” and noted that its scope would include the “role of traders and speculators.”

Oil prices have begun rising again like they did before the task force was formed. A spokesperson for the Justice Department, which is leading the task force, told McClatchy that “the working group is monitoring the situation, and if we find any evidence of criminal behavior or other misconduct we will respond immediately.” The task force is also assisting the Federal Trade Commission in an investigation of American oil refiners and “conducting other, nonpublic investigations” into the oil and gas industry.

A wide range of experts pinpointed oil speculation as the cause of both the 2008 and 2010 spikes in oil prices, with evidence strong enough that Obama felt the need to create such a task force in the first place. Oil prices are again rising rapidly despite the lowest demand since 1997, and experts are again pointing to “speculative money that’s flowed into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year, mostly from hedge funds and large money managers.”

As McClatchy noted, the U.S. currently has “ample oil and gasoline inventories,” suggesting that “oil and gasoline prices are disconnected from supply-and-demand market fundamentals” and are rising due to speculation. The only question now is whether the task force created to investigate such irregularities is committed to doing anything about it.

The “battle over energy exports is intensifying” and at the same time we have no coherent national export policy were the primary takeaways from an event called “Power Play:  Fossil Fuels and U.S. Export Strategy” held this morning at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.  Coal, refined petroleum products from tar sands, and natural gas are currently being exported to hungry overseas markets, and the event was designed to look at the implications of these decisions.

Panelists Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA)  bemoaned the fact that the United States does not have a national strategy on exports.  Wyden accused the country of being “on autopilot” to an energy export policy, which could have tremendous economic, social, and environmental consequences.  He expanded:

So I have been somebody who’s been expansionist on trade and think that we ought to have freer trade, have fairer trade, but we also need to have smarter trade.  And allowing energy producers—we haven’t really touched on this—to trade away our international competitiveness and our energy independence by exporting the resources right now without thinking through the implications here of what it means for consumers and our companies doesn’t strike me as a smart trade policy.

Watch it:

As the price of natural gas continues to plummet, pressure to export it as liquefied natural gas has increased, and last year the U.S. was a net exporter of refined petroleum products for the first time since 1949.  As well, the coal industry is preparing to significantly increase exports of American coal overseas.  In response to these trends, the members detailed four critical areas that could be impacted by exports, which they believe need more careful consideration:  domestic energy, national security, consumer prices, and environmental impacts.

A second panel addressed different perspectives on coal exports.  Panelists represented the energy finance industry, Pacific Northwest residents impacted by coal export traffic and terminals, landowners concerned about the impacts of mining, and a labor and environmental alliance.

Markey, who released a report at the event entitled “Drill Here, Sell There, Pay More,” summed up the need for serious thinking on exports by saying:

We should first decide what we want to do for the United States of America.

But, as Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal points out, attacks that claim we’re “not expanding our domestic energy capacity” like Cornyn’s “couldn’t be more misguided.”

With gas price misinformation everywhere, a few facts on oil production stand out:

– Under the Obama administration, domestic energy production is at its highest level in eight years.

– The U.S. has more oil and natural gas drilling rigs than the rest of the world. The number of rigs have exploded in the past three years to 1,272.

– “After declining to levels not seen since the 1940s, U.S. crude production began rising again in 2009,” writes the Houston Chronicle.

– The Energy Department confirmed yesterday that the U.S. exported more oil-product than imported for the first time since 1949.

– The five oil giants benefited from $200 million more profit for every penny rise in quarterly gas prices. Yet the industry still benefits from $40 billion in subsidies.

Clearly, we’re producing more oil:

Strangely, Buzzfeed argues this chart by the Obama administration “demonstrates how to play politics with statistics.” The main reason that our import mix is declining is that production has increased while we move to reduce oil dependence altogether with clean energy investments and new fuel efficiency standards that cut carbon pollution and more than $2.2 million barrels of oil per day.

PERRY: As a matter of fact, perception is everything in this world we live in, and if the perception is Newt Gingrich could be the next president of the United States, that will have a worldwide effect, I will suggest to you, on the price of oil. And people who watch these markets and people who deal with these markets understand, that when you see the type of approach that he’s talking about — opening up federal lands and waters, opening up that pipeline from Canada, clearly giving incentives to drill in America for domestic energy, and then an all of the above policy, whether it’s wind or nuclear or whatever it might be — that will have a dampening effect on the cost of oil in particular and the other energy prices as well.

Watch it:

Oil prices are actually unusually high right now, so either Gingrich’s abilities are less powerful than Perry suggests or not many people perceive that he could be the next president. Of course, domestic oil production is already up under President Obama, and oil prices are set in a global market, meaning increased domestic production has negligible impact, so Perry’s argument is a bit far-fetched, to say the least.

But Gingrich has relied on this kind of voodoo policy making before. He often says in stump speeches that the economy will begin to recover the night he is elected president, months before he has a chance to be inaugurated and implement any new policies.

Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) “instructed fellow Republicans to embrace the gas-pump anger,” while Rick Santorum conspiratorially claimed Obama is intentionally pushing up prices to cut carbon emissions. Not to be outdone, Newt Gingrich released a 30-minute video today about how “the Obama administration is so anti‑oil” that they’ve forced the price of gas to go up.

But there’s little truth to claims that Obama has curbed U.S. oil production and driven up gas prices in the process. As NPR noted this morning, the number of drilling rigs in U.S. oil fields has quadrupled under Obama and domestic oil production hit an 8-year high in 2011. For the first time in 60 years, the U.S. is now a net fuel exporter.

Oil demand was actually down 4.6 percent last week over last year, while the supply of gasoline has actually increased slightly since a year ago. So why are gas prices so high? As McClatchy’s Kevin Hall explains today, there is a systemic problem: speculation.

Energy futures markets serve a legitimate role in helping producers (like oil companies) and big end users (like airlines) hedge against price volatility, but lately, they’ve been taken over by Wall Street speculators who never intend to actually use the fuel they’re betting on. As Hall reports:

Historically, financial speculators accounted for about 30 percent of oil trading in commodity markets, while producers and end users made up about 70 percent. Today it’s almost the reverse.

A McClatchy review of the latest Commitment of Traders report from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates oil trading, shows that producers and merchants made up just 36 percent of all contracts traded in the week ending Feb. 14 while speculators who will never take delivery of the oil made up 64 percent.

Many experts, lawmakers (Democratic and Republican), and government regulators have expressed similar warnings.

Finally, after many delays, the government board responsible for regulating commodity futures markets finalized a rule in October to limit speculation, a power it was given by the Dodd-Frank Wall street reform law. However, the rule won’t go into effect until next October, as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) needs to collect “one year of interest data” first. The financial industry is fighting the new rule, but just today, the CFTC took action against a company in different market, providing an example of how the energy regulation can effectively work.

by Bill McKibben, reposted from TomDispatch

If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet — as we shall see — it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.

In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology.  Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.

It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”

In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history — 56% of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”

In the face of such data — statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet — you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to… deny there’s a problem.

Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the nominee because he’d caught on earlier than Newt or Mitt to the global warming “hoax.”

Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40% over the last two years. When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name.

And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.

It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.

Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.

Part of it’s simple enough: the giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.

Still, they could theoretically invest all that cash in new clean technology or research and development for the same. As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.

When I talked about a carbon bubble at the beginning of this essay, this is what I meant. Here are some of the relevant numbers, courtesy of the Capital Institute: we’re already seeing widespread climate disruption, but if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking disaster, many scientists have pointed to a two-degree rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with.

If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.

Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela).

If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything — including fund an endless campaigns of lies — to avoid coming to terms with its reality. So instead, we simply charge ahead.  To take just one example, last month the boss of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, called for burning all the country’s newly discovered coal, gas, and oil — believed to be 1,800 gigatons worth of carbon from our nation alone.

What he and the rest of the energy-industrial elite are denying, in other words, is that the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon bubble that looms over our world needs to be deflated soon. As with our fiscal crisis, failure to do so will cause enormous pain — pain, in fact, almost beyond imagining. After all, if you think banks are too big to fail, consider the climate as a whole and imagine the nature of the bailout that would face us when that bubble finally bursts.

Unfortunately, it won’t burst by itself — not in time, anyway. The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded denialism and their record campaign contributions, have been able to keep at bay even the tamest efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each passing day, they’re leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt — and with each passing day, they’re raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion.

Telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing. That’s why the fight is so pitched. That’s why those of us battling for the future need to raise our game. And it’s why that view from the satellites, however beautiful from a distance, is likely to become ever harder to recognize as our home planet.

This piece was originally published at TomDispatch.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

I’ve come to jokingly use this term for anything really huge.  (We are, after all, the Saudi Arabia of climate denial.) So in true American spirit, I am dubbing yesterday’s speech by Saudi Arabia’s Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi the Saudi Arabia of bold statements.

In a speech at the Middle East and North Africa energy conference in London yesterday, Al-Naimi — who once called renewable energy a “nightmare” — hailed energy efficiency and solar as important investments, global warming “real” and “pressing,” and explained that drilling for oil “does not create many jobs.”

“We know that pumping oil out of the ground does not create many jobs. It does not foster an entrepreneurial spirit, nor does it sharpen critical faculties.”

In the U.S., which is definitely not the Saudi Arabia of oil (that would be Saudi Arabia), there is a major industry campaign underway to convince Americans that drilling for fossil fuels will create over a million jobs in the country. However, assuming we drill virtually everywhere possible in America, credible analysis puts the real figure at a small fraction of that claim.

Even the Saudis, who pump out 12% of the world’s oil, understand that simply drilling for more oil isn’t a long-term economic strategy.

A business-as-usual path also puts us deeper into environmental debt, a point that the Saudi oil minister seems to understand as well. While Al-Naimi said he believes that oil production “will continue to play a major role in the overall energy mix for many decades,” he also made some very explicit statements about carbon emissions:

“Greenhouse gas emissions and global warming are among humanity’s most pressing concerns. Societal expectations on climate change are real, and our industry is expected to take a leadership role.”

It’s still not really clear what that “leadership role” is — except to pump out more oil and gas. Although, Al-Naimi did give a plug to efficiency and renewables as increasingly important part of the country’s energy strategy:

“The efficient use of energy is as much an issue for Saudi Arabia, with its huge natural resources, as it is for all countries. Increased efficiency makes sense environmentally, but also economically.”

“We are striving, also, to raise awareness among the public, and specifically addressing children and schools about the tangible benefits of energy efficiency. And we are investing manpower, and brainpower, in efforts to develop new thinking when it comes to energy efficiency.”

“I see renewable energy sources as supplementing existing sources, helping to prolong our continued export of crude oil. And this is why we are investing in solar energy, which we also have in abundance. The Kingdom experiences roughly 3,000 hours of sunshine per year, emitting about 7,000 watts of energy per square metre. Saudi Arabia also features empty stretches of desert that can host solar arrays and it is blessed with deposits of quartz that can be used in the manufacture of silicon photovoltaic cells.”

Saudi Arabia is considering a renewable energy law that would help promote a modest increase in solar photovoltaics, solar thermal, biogas and waste-heat-to-energy. However, if the strategy is seen only as a way to “prolong continued export of crude,” it doesn’t really match Al-Naimi’s statement that carbon-based resources are “among humanity’s most pressing concerns.”

Indeed, the gap between rhetoric and the pace of change in global energy production is one big Saudi Arabia of contradictions.

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The U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy approaches the Russian-flagged tanker vessel Renda Tuesday evening.

By Kiley Kroh

Today the Russian tanker Renda, escorted by the United States’ only operating icebreaking vessel, will attempt to make its final push in delivering much-needed fuel to the remote, icebound community of Nome, Alaska.  The ships’ progress has been impeded by high winds, strong currents, brutal cold, and thick sea ice. They moved just 50 feet on Tuesday and slowed even further on Wednesday.  With a 25-foot ice ridge still blocking access to the harbor, the tanker will be forced to attempt offloading its cargo through a mile-long hose to shore.

The tanker Renda and ice-breaker Healy arrive in the area of the ice-choked Nome harbor today.  Photo KNOM.

Ordinarily, the last delivery is made prior to the ice closing in, but this year it was delayed by a “monster storm” that hit Alaska in early November covering an area twice the size of Texas.  The tempest produced hurricane-force winds, blizzard conditions, coastal flooding, and spurred evacuations of many coastal communities.  The 3,500 residents of Nome, a city located on the western coast of Alaska, rely on tanker barges to deliver home heating oil, gasoline, and diesel for the winter months. The village has enough fuel to last until March, but ice in the Bering Sea won’t clear until midsummer.  In a bid to avoid the $9 per gallon gasoline that would likely result from flying fuel into the isolated city, the Nome-based Sitnasuak Native Corporation signed a contract to have a double-hulled Ice Classed Russian tanker deliver the 1.3 million gallons of fuel.

The unprecedented effort has captured worldwide attention and also brought serious concerns to light about the nation’s insufficient resources and infrastructure in the Arctic.  With the President of Royal Dutch Shell expressing confidence yesterday that his company will begin drilling in the fragile Arctic waters off Alaska’s northern coast this summer, addressing these concerns becomes even more urgent.

The Coast Guard is responsible for search and rescue, spill response and the national defense missions in the Arctic.  Their capacity in the region is limited and includes woefully inadequate icebreaking capacity.

The Coast Guard’s only working icebreaker is the 12 year-old Healy, which is mainly deployed on scientific missions and can only break through thinner ice. It has two other heavy-duty polar icebreakers, but both are out of commission at the moment. By comparison, Russia currently operates 20 icebreakers, including seven powerful nuclear-powered vessels, and China is in the process of building its second icebreaker.

As the Arctic melts at an alarming rate, the infrastructure in the U.S. Arctic is incapable of supporting the imminent increase in activity that will come from greater access to marine resources. Alaska has no deepwater offshore port or on-shore harbor along its western or North Slope shores.  As a recent E&E report explains, the Army Corps of Engineers has undertaken a three-year, $3 million study to determine whether or not to build at least one deepwater port in the US Arctic.  However, “once a site is selected, the financing, planning, design and construction could take 20 years to complete. Industry officials privately estimate that the cost of the project could climb to $1 billion.”

The extremely harsh environmental conditions complicate any effort to industrialize the Arctic, and put pristine natural resources in jeopardy.  Testifying before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard in July, Dr. Andrew Metzger of the University of Alaska Fairbanks stated,

“The rigors of the Arctic cannot be overstated.  People and facilities in this environ must contend with extreme cold, permanently frozen soil (permafrost) and lack of daylight in winter. In addition, coastal communities and marine infrastructure must contend with intense wind and wave conditions, subsea permafrost, accelerating erosion and potentially catastrophic hazards from sea ice. These harsh conditions will significantly shape development of marine infrastructure in the Arctic as well as stakeholder activities.”

An upcoming report from the Center for American progress, due to be released later this month, will examine in greater detail America’s deficiencies in regard to Arctic infrastructure and oil spill response preparedness, and suggest steps to be taken before activities, such as drilling, commence in the world’s last unspoiled frontier.

Today the world watches as the Renda and Healy wait until daylight to begin the final stage of their 10-day journey.  If the mission is successful, it will bring temporary relief to the residents of Nome.  But the challenges associated with a permanent U.S. presence in the Arctic will be much more difficult to overcome.

– Kiley Kroh is Associate Director of Ocean Communications at the Center for American Progress.

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