Originally Posted by mulp

Too late at night. I meant the North Slope and Prudoe Bay, which I recall being opened up in the 70s, and I must admit, I thought were basically the same until I started researching the oil fields in Alaska. The North Slope, to my surprise, has been producing oil for a century, and in 1928 was reserved for the Navy to fuel ships switching from coal to oil. In the 1970s, the North Slope was moved to the BLM and in 1980, the BLM was directed to lease it for oil exploration. Then the discoveries at Prudoe Bay were made, and so, Reagan-Bush did nothing with the North Slope. Then, Clinton, when the price of oil was in the toilet, got the plan for leasing it done. But when Bush took office, rather than going straight to lease sales, he changed it, which resulted in law suits, which stalled things. So the first leases didn't get done quickly, with the first sales in 2004 and 2006.

One of the comments I found interesting is that the environmentalists gave up on protecting this region, focusing on protecting ANWR. So, the BLM has been directed at leasing out the North Slope, but the oil companies and the Republicans don't bother with pushing forward on that region, but instead put all their effort into opening up ANWR. Not that they have fully developed Prudoe Bay, with Exxon sitting on Thomson Point leases, which are right next to ANWR, for three decades without doing anything.

And they have had leases in the lower 48 that they sat on and eventually abandoned. Of course, those old leases come up indirectly with claims of "an oil field as large as Ghawar but the environmentalists won't let us drill there." Look under the covers and you find that those 100 billion barrel oil fields can only deliver 5-10B and then very expensively, because the geology requires lots of drilling to get to the oil, unlike Ghawar where a dozen wells can drain the the entire 100 billion barrels. (They are using several hundred wells, with most injecting water, to push the oil to the extraction wells, so they can get 150+ billion barrels out of the field.)

So, bottom line is that for three decades and more, millions of acres of prime oil/gas US citizen owned territory has been directed by Congress to be leased to be explored for oil, but the oil companies focus on the unexplored area of ANWR, blaming environmentalists for denying the oil companies any place to drill for and produce oil. I figure that if Republicans had given them ANWR, they would have ignored that too, and instead demanded the right to drill in the most popular national parks, like the Grand Canyon, and then blame "environmentalists for denying them access to the oil place with oil in the US, and thus causing them to fail to add to their reserves. Of course, the would justify their high profits on the risk of drilling for oil, as if they were actually going to take a risk and drill for oil.

But perhaps what motivates the calls to drill in all these new places is the desperate hope that the can find and lease cheaply an oil field like Ghawar. If they explore ANWR, and as likely, fail to find the Ghawar that can deliver a million barrels a day from a single well for 50 years without any injection wells or any technology newer than 1940, then they will abandon ANWR and demand to drill someplace else, no matter how unlikely the potential for finding anything. Sort of a "if we keep searching, we will find Saddam's WMDs" mindset.