Nuiqsut is a city in North Slope Borough, Alaska, United States. The population was 512 at the 2020 Census and 92.5% Alaska Native. It is located in the midst of a vast quantity of oil reserves and the closest community to ConocoPhillips oil drilling project named Willow Project in the Alpine, Alaska oil field of the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska. It owns the surface rights, but not the subsurface rights of the Alpine field, which are with the regional Arctic Slope Regional Corporation.
ConocoPhillips Company is an American multinational corporation engaged in hydrocarbon exploration and production. It is based in the Energy Corridor district of Houston, Texas.
The Alaska North Slope is the region of the U.S. state of Alaska located on the northern slope of the Brooks Range along the coast of two marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean, the Chukchi Sea being on the western side of Point Barrow, and the Beaufort Sea on the eastern. With the exception of the highway connecting Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay, the region is disconnected from the rest of the Alaskan road system and relies mostly on waterways and small airports for transportation due to the Brooks Range secluding the region from the rest of the state.
The Colville River is a major river of the Arctic Ocean coast of Alaska in the United States, approximately 350 miles (560 km) long. One of the northernmost major rivers in North America, it drains a remote area of tundra on the north side of the Brooks Range entirely above the Arctic Circle in the southwestern corner of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The river is frozen for more than half the year and floods each spring.The Colville River and its adjacent hills are home to a variety of Arctic wildlife, including Lake Teshekpuk and Central Arctic caribou herds, and hawks.
Phillips Petroleum Company was an American oil company incorporated in 1917 that expanded into petroleum refining, marketing and transportation, natural gas gathering and the chemicals sectors. It was Phillips Petroleum that first found oil in the North Sea on December 23, 1969, at a position that was later named Ekofisk.
The Phillips 66 Company is an American multinational energy company headquartered in Westchase, Houston, Texas. Its name, dating back to 1927 as a trademark of the Phillips Petroleum Company, helped ground the newly reconfigured Phillips 66. The company today was formed ten years after Phillips merged with Conoco to form ConocoPhillips. The merged company spun off its refining, chemical, and retail assets into a new company bearing the Phillips name. It began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on May 1, 2012, under the ticker PSX.
The question of whether to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) has been an ongoing political controversy in the United States since 1977. As of 2017, Republicans have attempted to allow drilling in ANWR almost fifty times, finally being successful with the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
Teshekpuk Lake is the largest lake in Arctic Alaska, at 22 miles (35 km) width on the Alaska North Slope within the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, South of Pitt Point, 12 miles (19 km) east of Harrison Bay, 80 miles (130 km) east of Point Barrow. The Teshekpuk Lake region is considered one of the most productive, diverse, and sensitive wetland ecosystems in the entire Arctic, habitat to a variety of arctic wildlife, including the resident Teshekpuk Lake caribou herd of 64,000 animals, large numbers of shorebirds and migratory waterfowl, for whom it is an essential part of the East Asian–Australasian Flyway site network.
The Kuparuk River is a river in Alaska's North Slope that enters a bay on the Beaufort Sea between Beechey Point and Prudhoe Bay. The north-flowing river is about 200 miles (320 km) long, and its delta is about 3 miles (5 km) wide. Its Eskimo name appeared on a map drawn in 1901 by a prospector who spelled it Koopowra, which he translated as Big River. Kuukpaaġruk can be translated to a "smaller version of a big river".
The National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPRA) is an area of land on the Alaska North Slope owned by the United States federal government and managed by the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management (BLM). It lies to the west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which, as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service managed National Wildlife Refuge, is also federal land.
The Humber Refinery is a British oil refinery in South Killingholme, North Lincolnshire. It is situated south of the railway line next to the A160; Total's Lindsey Oil Refinery is north of the railway line.
Exploration for petroleum in the Arctic is expensive and challenging both technically and logistically. In the offshore, sea ice can be a major factor. There have been many discoveries of oil and gas in the several Arctic basins that have seen extensive exploration over past decades but distance from existing infrastructure has often deterred development. Development and production operations in the Arctic offshore as a result of exploration have been limited, with the exception of the Barents and Norwegian seas. In Alaska, exploration subsequent to the discovery of the Prudhoe Bay oilfield has focussed on the onshore and shallow coastal waters.
Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, or ASRC, is one of 13 Alaska Native Regional Corporations created under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA) in settlement of aboriginal land claims. ASRC was incorporated in Alaska on June 22, 1972. Headquartered in Utqiaġvik, Alaska, with administrative offices in Anchorage, ASRC was as of 2017, a for-profit corporation with nearly 11,000 Alaska Native shareholders primarily of Inupiat Eskimo descent.
Prudhoe Bay Oil Field is a large oil field on Alaska's North Slope. It is the largest oil field in North America, covering 213,543 acres (86,418 ha) and originally contained approximately 25 billion barrels (4.0×109 m3) of oil. The amount of recoverable oil in the field is more than double that of the next largest field in the United States by acreage (the East Texas Oil Field), while the largest by reserves is the Permian Basin (North America). The field was operated by BP; partners were ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips until August 2019; when BP sold all its Alaska assets to Hilcorp.
The Kuparuk River Oil Field, or Kuparuk, located in North Slope Borough, Alaska, United States, is the second largest oil field in North America by area. It started production in 1982, peaking in 1992. As of 2019, it produced approximately 71,021 barrels per day of oil for ConocoPhillips and has been estimated to have 2 billion barrels of recoverable oil reserves. It is named for the Kuparuk River.
Northstar Island is a 5-acre (20,000 m2) artificial island in the Beaufort Sea, 12 miles (19 km) northwest of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska and 6 miles (9.7 km) north of the Alaska coast. The island was created to develop the Northstar Oil Pool, which is located approximately 12,500 feet (3,800 m) below the seabed. The oil pool was discovered on January 30, 1984 by Royal Dutch Shell.
ConocoPhillips Alaska, Inc. is a subsidiary of ConocoPhillips, with its headquarters in Anchorage, Alaska. The company has major lease holdings on the North Slope and is Alaska's largest producer of oil and gas, employing about 1,000 persons.
Single steel drilling caisson is a drill barge that was built for year-round oil exploration in shallow ice-covered waters in the Beaufort Sea. The unit, initially named SSDC and later shortened to SDC, was converted from an old oil tanker in the early 1980s. It has been used to drill a total of eight oil wells on both Canadian and U.S. continental shelves, the most recent in 2006.
Harrison Bay is an estuary located north of Alaska that opens into the Beaufort Sea. It is adjacent to the Colville Delta. The powerful outflow of the Colville River creates a shallow region that is rich with nutrients, making it ecologically significant for wildlife.
The Willow project is an oil drilling project by ConocoPhillips located on the plain of the North Slope of Alaska in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska entirely on wetlands. The project was originally to construct and operate up to five drill pads for a total of 250 oil wells. Associated infrastructure includes access and infield roads, airstrips, pipelines, a gravel mine and a temporary island to facilitate module delivery via sealift barges on permafrost and between waters managed by the state of Alaska.
