To Drill Or Not To Drill

10 Pages 2396 Words

to be used for petroleum production in northern Alaska. Prudhoe, Kuparuk, Lisburne, and Endicott account for about twenty-five percent of all domestic oil production in the United States. All of these are on the North Slope and have spent lots of money on researching their effects on the environment. This research has led to a much better understanding of arctic ecosystems. The research has shown that petroleum production and exploration can peacefully coexist with the beautiful wildlife (Which One is the Real ANWR 1). These places of production will only be able to produce for a limited amount of time and ANWR needs to be opened in order to keep the United States from relying to heavily on foreign oil. ANWR must be opened for exploration and petroleum production because the needs for the industrial use of the land tremendously outweigh the needs to protect the “pristine” land that is actually desolate and isolated.
Of course, this is followed by a lot of argumentation from the opposing side. The liberals and environmentalists say that there is not even enough oil beneath ANWR to spend the money to industrialize it. Their main point of interest on the petroleum part of the topic is that the money spent to produce the oil would be higher then the money returned by actually producing it. Basically they say that there is not enough recoverable oil in ANWR to spend the time and money to pump it out. They predict that there are roughly two to six billion barrels of recoverable oil. Recoverable oil is oil that can be extracted through normal methods without the use of surfactants and emulsifiers. On the contrary, those in favor of opening ANWR say that there is a vast amount of oil lying beneath the surface. Oil experts predict that there is over twenty billion barrels of recoverable oil in ANWR. Nevertheless, these may be underestimates and overestimates respectively. The trustworthiest source is probably the U.S. Geolo...