40 Years at Prudhoe Bay: Hickel had role in Prudhoe Bay’s destiny

Former governor had uncanny interactions through two decades that contributed to the oil field’s discovery and development

Rose Ragsdale

For Petroleum News

Former Gov. Walter “Wally” Hickel tells a great story about the Prudhoe Bay oil field discovery.

“I flew to the Slope to meet with (Atlantic Richfield Co.) Alaska district manager Harry Jamison,” Hickel told a group of geologists in April 2008. “He shocked me by telling me that they (ARCO) were going to pull out. I told Harry, ‘You drill or I will.’ They did and the rest is history.”

Forty years later, the tale is so engaging that people chuckle when they hear it, and some may wonder if the 89-year-old retired politician embroiders around the facts a bit.

After all, Hickel couldn’t really have done the things he says he did, right? Wrong.

Not only did Hickel play a crucial role in several important events leading up to the 1967 discovery, he also predicted the oil find and went on to influence national policy on oil development in the Alaska Arctic as U.S. Interior Secretary under President Richard M. Nixon.

Hickel’s involvement with North Slope events began as early as 1952 when he read a report in The Anchorage Times that Congress was going to give Alaska 3 million acres.

Hickel, a young housing contractor in Anchorage, thought that was a paltry amount. So he traveled to Washington, D.C. on his own dime and ended up actually talking briefly with President Harry Truman.

Hickel also visited then U.S. Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft, R-Indiana, and made the case for statehood for Alaska.

When asked by Taft how much land Alaska would need as a young state, Hickel said he had no idea how many acres there were in Alaska, let alone how much the would-be state should have, so he just blurted out “100 million acres.”

When he later learned that Alaska had 365 million acres, Hickel said he should have asked for half of that amount.

Six years later, Congress granted Alaska statehood with 103 million acres of land.

40 billion barrels of oil

ARCO reasoned that it could never drill a well in the structure with open leases, but if all of the structure was leased, even if other companies owned the acreage, exploration could go forward.

Hickel agreed and seven critical tracts were leased in a state sale in January 1967. While other companies pulled out after drilling dry hole after dry hole in the mid-1960s, ARCO moved a rig north and prepared to drill a well in the Prudhoe Bay structure.

“Once we asked the governor to put up those tracts, to me that was a clear signal,” Jamison recalled in a recent interview. “You don’t renege on that obligation. Though it wasn’t a legal obligation, it was a moral one.”

For Hickel, the next brush with Prudhoe Bay’s fate came when he visited the discovery well site in the spring of 1968.

“Our first visitor was Alaska Gov. Walter J. Hickel, who was accompanied by (then Natural Resources Commissioner) Phil Holdsworth, (Oil & Gas Director) Roscoe Bell and (state geologist) Tom Marshall, and we had a group of Humble Oil managers along,” Jamison recalled. “It was early May 1967 and breakup was in full tide. We had to shut down the rig that day. I can verify that Wally, standing there in melting slush and water, actually did say he was convinced there were 40 billion barrels of oil at Prudhoe Bay.

(To date, the Prudhoe Bay area has yielded more than 15 billion barrels of crude and still holds at least another 5 billion barrels, plus billions more in heavy oil and about 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.)

“I’ve often wondered with clairvoyance like that why Wally stuck with politics,” Jamison quipped.

Hickel said Prudhoe Bay not only changed things in Alaska and America, the oil field also changed things in the world.

These days the former governor says he often finds himself at odds with the oil industry. He says company executives have a responsibility to their shareholders, but “those who helped make this state are dedicated to Alaska first.”

Adds Hickel: “It’s been an exciting ride.”