Oil drilling, they say, is by its nature a filthy business incompatible with wild spaces. Compared to 1970s-era oil development in Prudhoe Bay, with its spider's web of roadways and pipelines, its archipelago of waste pits and gravel pads, the Alpine complex completed last year is without question more friendly to the environment. There are no waste pits here. Trash is incinerated. Ash is hauled away.
Sewage is treated.
The company grinds up its industrial and human muck and injects the slurry into wells thousands of feet deep. Two gravel pads and a few miles of permanent road and airstrip cover 97 acres of tundra and drain a 40,000-acre oil field. About the size of the District of Columbia, it is the largest onshore oil discovery in the United States in a decade. There is, however, no escaping the fact that Alpine is a major industrial complex that can be seen and heard from miles away. It is powered by roaring turbines as loud as jets and visited by a half-dozen flights a day.