Green Jersey

Carrying oil to the lower 48

Toolik Field Station, AK – It’s like a strange, 800-mile-long piece of public art: The Alaska pipeline. A monument to the country’s LTR with oil that has carried billions of barrels of it, and still provides hundreds of thousands of barrels a day (15 percent of U.S. domestic oil production, according to operator Alyeska, though that figure may be low).

The pipeline, officially called Trans-Alaska, extends from Prudhoe Bay in the north to Valdez in the south. It could someday be joined by another for natural gas — a Senate committee last week approved an energy bill that increases federal loan guarantees for a gas pipeline here, a project Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin supports.

I took a bike ride from Toolik Field Station along the Dalton Highway yesterday and stopped at a small road that leads to the pipeline. A note said a permit was required to go further. But in other places — an area near the Kuparuk River today, and at a rest stop on our way to Toolik — we could walk right up to it legally. Today, I had to duck to walk under it. While we’re told a helicopter flies the length of the pipeline regularly, securing it seems like an impossible task.

Arguments for domestic energy production and against fossil fuels aside, one big metal tube punctuating the gorgeous landscape here may be enough — visually, at least.

– Jennifer Weiss