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Young geologist changed Alaska history Lands selection officer convinced state leaders to gain control of petroleum-rich North Slope acreage before Prudhoe Bay discovery Rose Ragsdale For Petroleum News
Like so many other young adventurers, Tom Marshall came to Alaska in 1958 to homestead on federal lands.
Marshall, a young geologist from Wyoming, also was eager to get in on the ground floor of the Cook Inlet oil exploration boom touched off by the Swanson River discovery in 1957.
“I also wanted to see if Alaska was the magnificent place that my grandfather Marshall said it was,” he told members of the Alaska Geological Society in April. The elder Marshall had traveled to Alaska decades earlier as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
From his first days in Alaska, the younger Marshall recalls clearing land at a cost of about $1,000 per acre.
“Homesteading was very hard on personal finances,” he said in explaining his decision to accept a position with the very young Alaska state government as an assistant lands selection officer.
“It looked very appealing as a means to get me through the winter,” he said.
Marshall, a University of Colorado-trained geologist, was asked to evaluate a federal opening for land selection on the North Slope in 1958.
Marshall said his principal source of information in preparing for the selections was professional papers published by the U.S. Geological Survey, which were crammed with lots of information about the Navy’s exploration program in the 1940s and 1950s.
Similarities to Rocky Mountain areas In 1960, the federal government established the Arctic National Wildlife Range (now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), covering the entire eastern end of the Arctic Slope and Brooks Range from the Canning River to the Alaska-Yukon border.
A year later, Alaska, as part of its land entitlement under the Statehood Act, selected more than 1.8 million acres of the Arctic coastal plain bordering the Beaufort Sea between what is now the National Petroleum Reserve - Alaska and ANWR.
It was an area the federal geologists had declared impossible to survey and estimated it would take 100 years to accomplish the task.
Marshall, who had been promoted to state land selection officer, enthusiastically recommended the swampy lake-covered area, which contains no surface rock exposures, be included in the state’s land selections because he found some general geological similarities of the Arctic Slope to petroleum-bearing areas in the Rocky Mountains.
“Regional geology is what I used in my selection criteria because it had meaning to me. I transferred my Rocky Mountain oil and gas exploration experience,” said Marshall. He also observed that the same USGS publications he studied were available to the Bureau of Land Management and the oil companies, “but they had their own ideas.”
Ironically, the state Division of Lands polled seven companies and none of them recommended the Prudhoe Bay area for lease. The oil companies wanted to drill in the area around the Colville basin, not on the Arctic coast.
During his investigation, Marshall said he noticed the 2,000- to 2,500-foot Lisburne Limestone over a broad area with all sorts of porosity.
“It excited me because back in Wyoming, we had the geologic equivalent of the Lisburne Limestone in our Madison Limestone, which had been in many areas of Wyoming, including Casper where I lived for many for years,” Marshall said.
He said the Lisburne Limestone was an unattainable 20,000 feet deep in the Colville Trough, and the limestone was probably at the latitude as the Umiat oil field.
“This was definitely considered an uneconomic depth,” Marshall said. “But regional geology to me means there would be a rise from the Colville Trough up to the Barrow Canyon Arch on the Beaufort Sea shore. It would be a terrific gathering area for petroleum and maybe there would be a big oil field there.”
Leaders believe in “big banana” Marshall recalled that he might have gotten “a little overdramatic” when he told Alaska Natural Resources Commissioner Phil Holdsworth and state lands director Roscoe Bell that “there could be a big banana up there on the coast.”
Marshall’s selections were the first ever made by the state that had no known surface uses.
Luckily for Alaska, Holdsworth and Bell had faith in Marshall’s judgment.
Other Alaska leaders, however, were skeptical.
Marshall said he received calls from politicians in Juneau wanting to know what the basis was for “Arctic waste land selection.”
Other taunts included “Marshall’s icebox” and “Marshall’s folly.” Fellow homesteaders dubbed the land selections “worthless tundra.”
Perhaps the cruelest taunt came later after some very disappointing dry holes on the Colville well and Union’s Kookpuk well from those who had witnessed Marshall’s earlier enthusiasm suggested that “there might be just the ‘banana skin,’ up there,” Marshall recalled.
It turned out that selection of the coastal plain area offered an additional advantage because it eliminated potential future disputes between the state and federal governments over the definition of navigable streams in upland areas. If the surrounding lands were state lands, it thus became unnecessary to define the limit of navigability of streams flowing into the Arctic Ocean.
The lands thus selected included Prudhoe Bay, an obscure geographic feature named more than 130 years earlier by Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin for his friend, Capt. Algernon Percy, Baron of Prudhoe and later Fourth Duke of Northumberland, in the first penetration by white men along the Arctic coast west of the Mackenzie River in Canada.
Trail leads to Prudhoe Bay By October 1964, the state received tentative approval for its land selections from the federal government, and scheduled for December its first competitive oil and gas lease sale on the North Slope.
In this sale, state took in a total of $5.6 million in bonus bids for leases covering acreage in the Kuparuk-Ugnu area of the North Slope. Though it wasn’t a huge sum, it was enough to cover the state’s land selection filing fees and compensate for its loss of highway funds for the entire North Slope.
Marshall was ecstatic.
Richfield Oil Co., meanwhile, had picked up more than 71,500 acres of land covering the crest of a subsurface geological structure on the shores of Prudhoe Bay. At that time, the only information available was seismic data combined with geological predictions on the nature of the subsurface rock types projected from the outcrops in the Brooks Range 80 to 130 miles to the south and east. The nearest exploratory well was in NPR-4, 75 miles west of Prudhoe Bay.
British Petroleum, following theories developed by its geologists, acquired nearly 82,000 acres lower down the flank of the Prudhoe Bay structure.
Nearly four years later, Atlantic Richfield Co. announced discovery and confirmation of the Prudhoe Bay oil and gas field, which 40 years later, remains North America’s largest petroleum reservoir. In a matter of months, “Marshall’s folly” had changed the course of history, becoming the single most important source of revenue for the state of Alaska.
Wrong theory, right location Marshall, who retired from the state in 1978 as chief petroleum geologists for the Division of Oil and Gas, continues to work as a consulting geologist.
“I don’t want to sound to smart about the discovery, because frankly, I was dead wrong. I had read reports about the Sadlerochit Sandstone and the Ivishak Formation. They were described as being primarily quartzite, which has to be zero porosity. I couldn’t see outcrops of these Ivishak Sands in the information I had about the region across the broad Slope, and it didn’t seem to impress the USGS geologists who studied them in the Foothills area,” he explained. “But as we know, the Prudhoe Bay discovery was primarily in the Ivishak sands of the Sadlerochit Formation, which I did not even consider. I thought it was going to be the Lisburne. Fortunately, it’s in both of them. But the Lisburne is a far distant 3rd or 4th largest reservoir on the North Slope.” l
... Read the rest of the story in “Harnessing a Giant,” which will be available in October. Call Theresa Collins at 907-522-9469 for more information.
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