Oil and the environment: the oil industry has changed in the past 30 years. For the better.

• Author: Jones, Patricia
• Position: Oil & Gas

The look of Alaska's North Slope oil fields has changed dramatically during their 30-plus years of development. Facilities are smaller and consolidated. Waste pits have been eliminated and trash disposal is handled in a more environmentally sensitive manner. And some remote facilities have no permanent roads connecting to existing centralized infrastructure.

Some of the new methods for developing North Slope fields have come about from advances in drilling technology, which result in fewer wells that can tap larger underground areas.

"All of those things also have economic impacts that are positive," said Dawn Patience, spokeswoman for Conoco/Phillips Alaska Inc. "Environmental and economical awareness seem to go together well."

Alaska's major oil producers also are spending significant resources to clean up from the past. Those projects include removing old exploration equipment abandoned on the North Slope, as well as cleaning out and removing reserve pits typically built for waste disposal during the early days of development at Prudhoe Bay.

These new methods of development provide more than just surface appearance changes-they decrease developmental and operational costs while reducing environmental impacts to the North Slope. The two trends of cutting costs and reducing physical impact work together to help create a more stable atmosphere for future oil field development.

"The two are pretty intricately intertwined anymore," said Paul Laird, spokesman for BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc. "If environmental impacts don't cost you in the short term, they do cost you in the long term, so anything you can do to minimize the environmental impact in the short term will help you in the long term ... it's going to reduce your costs in the long term."

Finally, producers are contributing data, access and funds for continued environmental research to better understand the industry's effect on the North Slope environment. Those efforts hopefully will help design future projects that lessen environmental impact while maintaining a stable and strong contributorship to the state's economy.

NEW FIELD DEVELOPMENTS PROVIDE MORE ENVIRONMENTALLY SENSITIVE DESIGNS

The changes in Alaska's oil field developments have slowly transitioned from the early days at Prudhoe Bay to recent projects built in outlying areas--those of Alpine, Northstar and Badami.

Even satellite developments built in the early 1990s were designed and continue to operate with a scaled-down structure and accompanying environmental impacL

For example, the Prudhoe Bay A Pad built during the...