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40 Years at Prudhoe Bay: Oil development spans more than 100 years Prudhoe Bay field discovery follows decades of exploration and production by geologists, others, on and off the Arctic Slope Rose Ragsdale For Petroleum News
Discovery of the giant Prudhoe Bay oil field in 1968 near the shore of the Beaufort Sea sparked a new era in petroleum exploration and production in North America and changed Alaska forever.
But before geologists narrowed their search to the central North Slope in the mid-1960s, the Arctic Slope of Alaska, that area of coastal plain and foothills north of the Brooks Mountain Range, had been a focus of at least modest geological inquiry for at least 75 years.
Indeed, Alaska oil and gas exploration dates back more than 100 years to wilderness locations rimming the Gulf of Alaska, Cook Inlet and the Alaska Peninsula. Discoveries include the Katalla oil field near Prince William Sound and the town of Cordova in the late 1800s and the Swanson River oil field in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in 1957. In fact, at the time of the Prudhoe Bay oil field discovery in 1968, Cook Inlet oil production was nearing its zenith.
Petroleum development in northern Alaska probably began when Inupiat travelers along the coast discovered natural oil seeps near Cape Simpson, 50 miles southeast of Barrow and 150 miles northwest of Prudhoe Bay, and at Angun (Ungoon) Point, 30 miles southeast of the village of Kaktovik on Barter Island, within what today is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Residents of the area traveled to these seeps to cut out blocks of oil-soaked tundra to take back to their homes to use as fuel. These deposits were generally unknown to the outside world until the early 1900s.
Teacher stakes first claim The first wildcatter to stake a claim on the North Slope of Alaska was William Van Valin, a U.S. Bureau of Education teacher from the Arctic village of Wainwright. Van Valin had heard stories of an oil lake on the Arctic coast near Cape Simpson, so in the summer of 1914 he traveled more than 500 miles to the east side of Smith Bay.
Smith Bay was located one mile from the Arctic Ocean and was soon to be part of his claim.
The U.S. government became aware of the oil seeps when Ernest de Koven Leffingwell, a geologist on a privately funded expedition, spent seven years from 1906 to 1914 mapping the geology of what is now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and surveying the Arctic coastline. Leffingwell reported what he had learned from locals and sent samples to Alfred H. Brooks, head of the Alaska section of the U.S. Geological Survey, who included the information in a 1909 USGS annual report. In this report, Brooks surmised that there might be a petroleum field in northern Alaska, but thought that it would be of no value owing to the remoteness of the area.
In 1921, Standard Oil Co. of California and General Petroleum Co. sent representatives to examine the seepages at Cape Simpson near Barrow. They found two flows, but commercial development did not follow because of more accessible finds in other parts of the country, particularly in California.
“Leffingwell’s final report on the Canning River region, published by the USGS in 1919, had even more details about the seeps at Cape Simpson – which was undoubtedly the reason Standard Oil and General Petroleum sent people to look at them,” according to geologist Gil Mull.
By 1921, prospecting permits were filed under the mining laws and expeditions of geologists from USGS had identified petroleum possibilities in northern Alaska.
In 1923 during President Warren G. Harding’s administration, large areas surrounding the seeps at Cape Simpson and extending south of the crest of the Brooks Range were withdrawn from oil and gas or mineral leasing to become the Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4 (now National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska). During this era following World War I, the Navy had become increasingly aware of its dependence upon oil to fuel its fleet and was concerned about future supplies.
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