Prudhoe Bay marks 37th birthday this summer

By Frank Baker

June 20, 1977 was a gray, overcast morning at Prudhoe Bay as scores of reporters, dignitaries and others huddled around Milepost 0 of the trans-Alaska pipeline to witness history. At 10:26 a.m., pumps were started, valves were opened and the first crude oil from North America’s largest oil field flowed into the pipeline for its 800-mile journey to Valdez, where it would be loaded aboard a tanker destined for the U.S. West Coast.

It was a historic moment for the nation, which was heavily reliant on OPEC oil, and the State of Alaska, which was struggling to gain its economic footing as a new state. For BP and ARCO, the two operators of the giant Prudhoe Bay field, it was a long-awaited moment — the culmination of a major push into the Arctic that had begun nearly 20 years earlier when geologists first ventured north to probe this remote frontier. Their search paid off in 1968 with the discovery of Prudhoe Bay — ranked among the top 20 oil fields ever discovered worldwide and still the largest field discovered in North America. Early estimates were 9.6 billion barrels of recoverable oil, making it a field of Middle Eastern size.

Thirty-seven years later, after yielding more than 12 billion barrels of oil, the field is still producing about 260,000 barrels per day. It has provided the State of Alaska billions of dollars in taxes and royalties, created tens of thousands of jobs and helped boost the Permanent Fund to more than $50 billion.

Today, Alaska’s oil industry accounts for about 90 percent of the state’s revenues, with a large share coming from Prudhoe Bay. In addition to its economic benefits, Prudhoe Bay and the field developments it spawned have served as a proving ground for the advancement of oil field technology, Arctic engineering, and significantly increased knowledge of the Arctic environment.

Counting production from Prudhoe Bay and other North Slope oil fields, Alyeska Pipeline Service Company has reliably delivered nearly 17 billion barrels to the Valdez Marine Terminal. A monument at the terminal bears an inscription dedicated to the tens of thousands of men and women who worked on the TAPS project from 1974-77: “We didn’t know it couldn’t be done.”

Start up, 1977.

Return to newsletter headlines