page_title: Alaska North Slope
section_title: Petroleum resources
hierarchical_section_title: Alaska North Slope / Petroleum resources
caption_attribution_description: English: GSI Seismic Exploration Crew, Deadhorse Alaska, 11 January 1981
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: The Alaska North Slope region includes the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska, with the bulk of Alaska's known petroleum until the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field was discovered in 1968, followed by the Kuparuk River oil field in 1969.  The region also includes the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which itself has been the subject of controversy surrounding the possibility of petroleum drilling within its boundaries. The petroleum extracted from the region is transferred south by means of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System to Valdez on the Pacific Ocean. Under the North Slope is an ancient seabed, which is the source of the oil. Within the North Slope, there is a geological feature called the Barrow Arch – a belt of the kind of rock known to be able to serve as a trap for oil. It runs from the city of Utqiagvik to a point just west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Arctic Alaska Petroleum Province, encompassing all the lands and adjacent Continental Shelf areas north of the Brooks Range-Herald arch (see map) were estimated by the USGS in 2005 to hold more than 50 billion bbl of oil and natural-gas liquids and 227 trillion cubic feet of gas.
  The source rock for the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field and neighboring reserves is also a potential source for tight oil and shale gas – possibly containing "up to 2 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil and up to 80 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to a 2012 U.S. Geological Survey report."
  Ira Harkey quotes Noel Wien as stating that in the 1920s, "To keep warm and to cook with, the Eskimo was burning hunks of dark stuff he just picked up on the ground all around his tent.  This was oil from seepage under the tundra.  The Eskimos had always known about the oil, long before there was any drilling for it."
caption: Geophysical Service Inc. seismic exploration crew, Deadhorse, Alaska, 1981
exif: {"Image Software": "Picasa", "Image DateTime": "2013:08:24 23:02:11", "Image Artist": "Picasa", "Image ExifOffset": "2194", "Image XPKeywords": "[65, 0, 108, 0, 97, 0, 115, 0, 107, 0, 97, 0, 0, 0]", "Image Padding": "[]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "4534", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3426", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2013:08:24 22:44:08", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2694", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1733", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "Interoperability RelatedImageWidth": "5100", "Interoperability RelatedImageLength": "7014", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "4398", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "b73f0e4e4bcca2238974be8fe8672bfe", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}