Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land

by Walter R. Borneman

All told, Humble spent about $50 million on this early tanker experiment, but supertankers loading directly on the Arctic coast weren’t the only alternatives to a pipeline being discussed. For a short time, Boeing promoted a giant air tanker version of its jumbo 747. Let’s just fly the oil out. Others suggested a fleet of 900-foot-long nuclear submarines, literally filled with oil. Still others proposed extending the Alaska Railroad north from Fairbanks and shipping the oil south in tank cars. All of these forms had limited capacity and incurred substantial transportation costs. Finally, there was cartoonist Mark Wheeler from Ketchikan who showed a bucket brigade of Alaskans stretching from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. Thus, a pipeline remained the favorite and seemed to make the most economic sense. But whether it would run south to Valdez or east into Canada and directly to Midwest markets was still a matter of heated debate.5