The 26,000 caribou of the Teshekpuk herd could face a similar demise, and "we must not allow that to happen," Babbitt said.
U.S. officials said the national reserve could produce anywhere from 500 million barrels to 2.2 billion barrels of oil. Production could be expected to generate $16.5 million a year in taxes and royalties and create about 500 new jobs.
Assuming final adoption of the environmental report later this year, the first tracts could be put out to bid in mid-1999, with the first oil pumped a decade from now.
The original Prudhoe Bay oil field that launched the boom on the North Slope is laced with wells, pipelines, roads and production facilities. Impacts on migrating caribou and other wildlife have been unmistakable.
But industry officials say the latest production ventures farther out on the slope have minimized the oil footprint, extracting crude diagonally out of a wide area from a single rig location, constructing drilling pads one-tenth of the size they used to be, accessing rigs via helicopter and winter ice roads and locating pipelines with careful attention to wildlife migratory routes and minimal disruption to waterways.
"We can explore in the winter with no impact on the habitat and the environment. We do our drilling off of ice pads, and in the spring when the ice thaws, you cannot tell we were there," Meyers said.
Previous tentative attempts to lease tracts in the National Petroleum Reserve during the 1980s produced no serious bidders, largely because there wasn't enough oil to interest anyone, and existing North Slope fields were still gushing. Newer technology has allowed oil companies to generate more profit from smaller fields, however. And when Arco in 1996 struck 365 million barrels of oil on its Alpine site, 60 miles west of Prudhoe Bay on the edge of the reserve, interest in probing farther west mounted.
Alaska, heavily dependent on North Slope oil to fuel its budget, has pushed to expand oil development outside the central slope, and Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles was instrumental in persuading President Clinton to embark on the current leasing plan within 4.6 million acres of the reserve.
Environmental groups have urged the government to hold off on leasing any of the reserve at a time when oil supplies are cheap and plentiful.
