Our Modern Lives Demand Energy – So We Must Demand
Energy We Can Live With
— Ben Boettger
For about 60 years, natural gas extracted in and around Cook Inlet has provided most of our heat and nearly all our electricity. The gasoline in our cars and planes is produced by the refinery in Nikiski, which primarily uses crude from Cook Inlet, as well as from the North Slope and other places. In the Cook Inlet | Tikahtnu watershed, we’ve never been able to take our energy for granted or ignore its costs – financially or ecologically.
Between 1987 and 1992, the operators of Cook Inlet’s oil and gas platforms—at the time, Unocal, Shell Western, and Marathon—committed over 4,200 violations of the federal Clean Water Act. The nonprofits Trustees for Alaska and Greenpeace cataloged these violations and started litigation that the Environmental Protection Agency later joined.
When this case began in 1994, the largest oil spill in Cook Inlet’s history was a fresh memory. On July 2, 1987, the tanker Glacier Bay was carrying North Slope crude to the Nikiski refinery from the pipeline terminal in Valdez when it ran aground south of the Kenai River mouth and spilled 160,000 gallons. At the peak of the commercial fishing season, set-net sites downstream were devastated. NOAA incident reports record several tens of thousands of pounds of oiled salmon discarded by set-netters and canneries and over a hundred thousand dollars worth of fishing gear ruined by oil. The largest spill from the Inlet’s production infrastructure had also recently oiled the waters — a pipeline failure at the Drift River Oil Terminal on Cook Inlet’s westside released 96,000 gallons in March 1990. Of course, these numbers were dwarfed in neighboring Prince William Sound when the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude in March 1989. By May, thick foamy oil patches had made their way into Cook Inlet and were seen as far north as Ninilchik.
Big pollution events focus public attention, but smaller ones add up. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimates that 656,292 gallons of oil were released from Cook Inlet oil and gas production between 1966 and 2019. This doesn’t count shipping incidents such as Glacier Bay or the permitted discharge from oil and gas production infrastructure. It’s hard to study the cumulative effect of steady, low-level pollution from many sources, and still harder to track the consequences for Cook Inlet of the global fossil energy system and its damage to the climate — though we know Alaska is warming at three times the rate of lower latitudes, and our stream temperature monitoring has shown water temperatures becoming harmful to salmon.
Compromising our watershed for our fossil-fuel-based energy system was unacceptable for many people in Cook Inlet. Clean and sustainable fisheries feed our economies and diets, and the universal need for clean water is hard to overstate. Perhaps no physical thing is more fundamental to our shared well-being than clean water. Though reliable and secure energy is surely on that list, too.
When local oil and gas extractors resolved their Clean Water Act violations in 1994, it became an opportunity for the Inlet’s people to take control of their own watershed’s health. The citizen lawsuit resulted in the companies paying for their pollution with a settlement dedicated to spinning up a local watchdog organization to monitor and fight for the health of our watershed and the life it sustains. With this funding, Cook Inletkeeper was incorporated in April 1995.
As Inletkeeper heads into its 30th year in 2025, tension remains between our energy needs and the environment we live in. We still burn Inlet gas for roughly 80% of our electricity. While a combination of greater scrutiny and a shrinking industry may have reduced the frequency and magnitude of major spills, the risk remains and will increase if we allow expansion of oil and gas development into the federal waters of Lower Cook Inlet. The cumulative effect of minor spills and allowing pollution to be permitted in larger mixing zone areas also remains, not to mention the growing impacts of climate change.
On a positive note, we now have an opportunity that the concerned citizens of 30 years ago could only have hoped for. With technology finally ready to realize the massive renewable energy opportunities in our wind, sun, and small hydro prospects (with tidal and geothermal technologies developing rapidly), we can reduce our dependence on fossil fuels for our energy needs. Our economic interest also aligns with drastically reducing gas consumption in the very near future and creating the next generation of local energy jobs. To seize this opportunity, we need to organize and advocate just as the original Inletkeepers did in the ’90s, to ensure our decision-makers don’t let these opportunities slip through our hands.
The deployment of renewable energy in Cook Inlet will also require close scrutiny, and Inletkeeper is equally ready to be the watchdog and ecological advocate the new industry needs. With your support, we will continue to defend the watershed in the energy decisions ahead.