Alaska Pursuing Shale Oil to Fill Pipeline
Canada may have its Albertan oil sands, and North Dakota has its Bakken oil formation. But don’t count Alaska out when it comes to producing unconventional oil.
Alaska, which has fallen behind North Dakota in oil output and whose Prudhoe Bay oil fields are waning, is exploring the possibility of extracting oil from the source rock on the state’s North Slope. The state has leased more than half a million acres of its land to exploration companies, and even some environmentalists believe that the shale oil development could be the best way to increase output with relatively modest damage to the environment.
As in shale developments in Texas, North Dakota and elsewhere in the lower 48 states, the key to unlocking Alaska’s shale oil is a combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, a method of injecting a mix of water, sand and chemicals at high pressure to free up captured oil and gas.
As in Canada and North Dakota, a pipeline is playing a key role in the public debate over this new technological frontier. But whereas a new pipeline — the Keystone XL extension — is needed to get oil to markets in the lower 48, the quandary in Alaska is how to fill the existing Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. That pipeline is operating at less than one-third of its total capacity, as the Prudhoe Bay fields decline.
For the moment, it remains unclear whether Alaska can replicate the shale oil boom that is reshaping North Dakota and parts of Texas. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) issued its first assessment of the North Slope’s shale rock resources in February, estimating that the region contained between zero and 2 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, along with between zero and 80 trillion cubic feet of gas.
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