Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land

by Walter R. Borneman

As the press beat a path to its corporate door, Atlantic Richfield spoon-fed them the numbers. Yes, a new test between 9,500 feet and 9,800 feet had flowed 1.3 million cubic feet of gas a day and almost 1,200 barrels of oil. No mention was made of Keasler’s 22-million-cubic-feet figure or the 40 million cubic feet recorded after that. Finally, on June 25, 1968, ARCO announced that Prudhoe Bay State No. 1 had indeed produced natural gas at 40 million cubic feet a day and crude oil at up to 2,415 barrels a day. It also confirmed that Sag River State No. 1, drilled with the Canadian rig that BP had relinquished on the Colville, had also found oil in the same formation and at the same depth seven miles away. Engineers and accountants whipped out their slide rules and did the math. If that indeed was all one field, it meant a heck of a lot of oil. Fairbanks and the rest of Alaska went wild. No one had seen anything like it since the day the steamer Portland docked in Seattle with “a ton of gold.” Only this time, the gold was black.