Background

Federal law currently prohibits oil and natural gas development in ANWR.  ANWR is located on the northern coast of Alaska due east of both Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field ever discovered in the United States, and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA) (Figure 1).  In 1998, the USGS estimated that between 5.7 and 16.0 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil¹ are in the coastal plain area of ANWR (also referred to as the 1002 Area), with a mean estimate of 10.4 billion barrels, of which 7.7 billion barrels falls within the Federal portion of the ANWR 1002 Area.²  In comparison, the estimated volume of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in the rest of the United States is about 120 billion barrels.³

In developing ANWR’s technically recoverable oil resources, the USGS estimated both the original-oil-in-place (OOIP) volumes and the recovery factors for those volumes.  This additional information is important for analyses of very long-term issues, such as discussions surrounding the peaking of world oil supply, where the recovery factors implicit in an estimate of technically recoverable resources may be significantly changed by price and technology developments over time.  However, for the present analysis, which focuses on production profiles over the next two decades, the technically recoverable resource estimates provided by USGS provide a reasonable starting point.

For the purposes of this analysis, any reference to ANWR pertains to all Federal, State, and Native lands within and adjacent to the 1002 Area.  Both the State officials and Native corporations have expressed a strong interest in developing their respective oil resources, which are legally and/or economically linked to a Congressional decision to allow development in ANWR, as discussed in EIA’s 2004 report.

ANWR was created by the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) in 1980. Section 1002 of ANILCA deferred a decision on the management of oil and natural gas exploration and development of 1.5 million acres of potentially productive lands in the coastal plain of ANWR. The coastal plain area represents about 8 percent of the total area of ANWR. The USGS estimates that 74 percent of the oil resources in ANWR’s coastal plain area are on Federal lands, with the remaining 26 percent on State and Native lands.

To date, there has been no assessment of the oil and natural gas resources in the rest of ANWR outside of the coastal plain area. However, it is unlikely that the non-coastal plain area of ANWR has the same level of resources that are estimated to be in the coastal plain area, due to differences in geology.

Notes