Trans-Alaska Pipeline System as it snakes through Alaska's interior

But it wasn’t until Dec. 26, 1967, when Richfield Oil Company (later to become ARCO) tested a North Slope wildcat near Prudhoe Bay—its final exploratory well there after a string of dry holes—that a world-class petroleum province was born in the American Arctic.

The Prudhoe Bay discovery then was estimated to hold 9.6 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Since then, technology advances have helped push that reserves total number to more than 13 billion barrels.

Even coming at a time of soaring oil prices and an energy crisis that was the “moral equivalent of war” in the 1970s, it was an uphill battle to develop this huge discovery and the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) to bring Prudhoe oil to tidewater at Valdez, AK, for shipping to market. Heavy political opposition, native lands concerns, and lawsuits by environmental lobby groups almost doomed the megaprojects.

TAPS came on stream in 1977, and its existence catalyzed waves of drilling onshore and offshore the North Slope, leading to the discovery of other giant (Kuparuk River) and near-giant (Endicott) oilfields. By the late 1980s, Alaskan North Slope oil production was averaging almost 2 million barrels per day, peaking at 25 percent of the Nation’s oil output in 1988, the year Prudhoe Bay started its decline.

The State’s current total oil output of about 800,000 barrels per day accounts for only 17 percent of domestic oil production today. If North Slope production had remained constant, Alaska would account for almost 40% of the Nation’s domestic crude oil supply today.