Siberia, Green and Black
During August 1993, Western scientists were finally invited into the long-closed oil-producing region of western Siberia. What they found was reported in a November issue of the British journal New Scientist, in an article titled "The Scandal of Siberia." It's a report worth reading for any Alaskan, since we share with that part of Asia both a far northern location and a lot of oil and gas. And, though we may be chronically annoyed by one aspect or another of our relationship with the petroleum industry, Siberia's experience shows we've escaped much potential trouble.
As recently as twenty-odd years ago, the muskeg and taiga forests of western Siberia, an area about the size of all Europe west of the old Iron Curtain, were largely undisturbed. Native peoples herded reindeer, fished, and trapped. Add timber and other forest products to that list, and you'd pretty much have described the entire regional economy. Now it's hard to find any area more than a mile from some industry-related disturbance, and cities dot the landscape---including one founded in 1976 with a population now greater than 100,000.
The visiting scientists, a dozen academic researchers in ecology and petroleum engineering, were asked by Moscow's International Forestry Institute to provide advice to the Russian engineers on how to reduce the environmental impact of the work and on how to ameliorate the effects already produced by the development. In a way, the first part of the problem was the easier. Even though the Siberian fields produce 60 percent of Russia's oil and nearly all the natural gas piped to France, Italy, and Germany, their technology is primitive by Western standards. Newer drilling techniques and handling methods could reduce the problems; for example, the Russian engineers used the one hole-one drill pad approach, with each well requiring its own pipes, power lines, and access roads. According to a British engineer, 20 or more of these pads could be replaced by a single drilling point, thus tearing up only a twentieth as much of the landscape.
Some of the most troubling problems could have been prevented by what seemed to the visitors a most obvious application of not-so-new technology. Oily wastes go into leach pits, just as they do at most oil fields everywhere, but the Siberian pits are not lined. The leachate percolates easily through the sand underlying much of the area, joining spilled oil in contaminating ground water and the many streams that flow eventually to the Arctic...Which means, of course, that some of Siberia's problems could end up at our back door.
Others are more directly local, and will not be easily solved for a nation struggling with what amounts to its second revolution in a century. Forest fires are hard to fight when both organizational structures and funding supplies are frayed; no one takes the time to worry about industrial debris and litter when so many more important problems loom; and illegal hunting is especially hard to control when the usual food-supplying system is stuttering along erratically.
Haste, ignorance, and too narrow a view of what real costs are acceptable can explain what has happened in Siberia. Despite the Exxon Valdez spill and numerous other aggravations from and for Big Oil, Alaska's litigious and argumentative environment for petroleum development may have been about the best thing possible for all concerned. And, though in hindsight we may like to think that Alaska proceeded with measured wisdom while the oil companies responded with reason and patience, perhaps mostly we blundered onto a fairly decent course of action. I recommend the book The Trans-Alaska Pipeline Controversy by Peter Coates, as a cautionary dose of reality in remembering. It was recently reprinted in paperback by the University of Alaska Press, and I read it over the holidays---and found that it was very good for encouraging humility.
