Review by Jack Roderick
Alaska History
a publication of the Alaska Historical Society
Spring 2009
John M. Sweet'sDiscovery at Prudhoe Bay is an adventure story of how he and his fellow Atlantic Richfield corporation executives, after more than a dozen dry holes in the Prudhoe Bay area of Alaska's North Slope, decided to drill another well. Why and who made that risky and momentous decision is Sweet's personal story.
Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. Geological Survey geologists tramped across Alaska's frozen North Slope looking for oil. How these early explorers dealt with transportation problems, with courageous bush pilots and sled dogs, mushy ice storms, maintaining remote food caches, polar bear encounters...are all part of this northern survival drama. How the U.S. Navy explored the western half of the slope, then called Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4 (Pet-4) during the 1950s, and now again in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), is part of the story.
Alaska's first commercial oil was discovered on the Kenai Peninsula in Cook Inlet in 1957, causing U.S. and foreign major oil companies to flock to the slope. Sweet's own company, Atlantic Refining, had the great good fortune, immediately prior to the discovery at Prudhoe, of having acquired one of the best explorers, Richfield Oil Corporation, thus creating Atlantic Richfield (ARCO).
Along with the inside corporate story, Sweet gives us a detailed explanation of what it takes to explore for oil. He explains in layman terms general geology, regional geology, how one leases land, how geophysics works (doodle-buggers), how wells are staked, spudded, drilled, logged, drillstem tested, and the like. He also describes porosity, permeability, Lisburne limestone, Sadlerochit (Ivishak), Sagavanirktok, and many other geologic formations.
In particular, he describes how natural gas first flowed in late December 1967 from the discovery well, Prudhoe Bay State No. 1. How the following July during a drillstem test at the confirmation well, Sag River State No. 1, located about seven miles southeast of Prudhoe, crude oil gushed forth from deep beneath the permafrost. He gives estimates of petroleum reserves in the various North Slope fields, a brief history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971), how the trans-Alaska oil pipeline was built, and what effect Alaska's Permanent Fund has had on Alaska. The book is a veritable textbook of geological and historical facts.
Notably, the book has good maps, photographs, and diagrams. There is a photograph of a painting by fellow geologist Marvin Mangus, and geologist Bill Foran's field notes from the mid 1920s. The book's handout says it will appeal particularly to Alaskan buffs, historians, adventure seekers, geologists, as well as those with no knowledge of the Prudhoe Bay story. It should. Sweet should be very proud of this book. I think readers will be too. Interestingly, though disappointing, Sweet fails to mention that he served as a member of the State's House of Representatives in Juneau in 1969-1970.
Sweet says exploring for oil and gas gives one a sense of adventure against success odds. He says, adventure and excitement go hand in hand. So with Sweet and this good book.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Review by Callan Bentley
Earth magazine
April 2009
www.earthmagazine.org
An Oilman Tells His Tale
Author John M. Sweet, a former exploration geologist with Atlantic-Richfield Company (ARCO), recounts the story of how oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. This single field generates 17 percent of U.S. domestic oil production, more than twice the output of the next-largest field.
But Discovery at Prudhoe Bay is more than just a story of one oilfield. I also learned a lot about how the oil industry works. The book details not only the nitty-gritty of surveying and drilling, but also the backroom politics, personalities and ploys that led to that first Prudhoe Bay drill hole in 1967. Sweet gives substantial background history too.
Sweet also tells us how Alaska's oil boom transformed life in Alaska. In 1971, Richard Nixon signed into law the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the largest legal settlement over native claims to lands in the United States...The sale of leases for oil also created the Alaska Permanent Fund, the source of the annual dividend checks distributed to every Alaskan citizen.
Despite the impressive central story, one of my favorite parts of the book was the most distant backstory that it told: the exploration of Alaska in the first years of the 20th century. These were serious expeditions, through 'terra incognita' with low supplies and lower temperatures...Sweet explains how these journeys provided the foundation that would eventually lead him and his colleagues to drill for oil.
Sweet [provides us] with a vivid firsthand account of the massive 1964 Good Friday earthquake, including tales from friends who lived in the doomed Anchorage suburb of Turnagain Heights, which collapsed into Cook Inlet. Sweet's ARCO colleagues were civic-minded residents who went from house to damaged house rescuing survivors.
All in all, the book is an important historical document, and I found it to be a comfortable read. It is most effective when Sweet related his first-person experiences on the project...John Sweet is an oilman, doggone it, not some poet! And he has recorded an important saga that has far-reaching impacts in the modern world.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Review by Jim Barkdull
Petroleum Geologist
In my opinion Prudhoe Bay should be required reading for geology majors as it is so complete a treatise on what exactly is first class exploration geology. It is also part Jack London and part Indiana Jones. And best of all it details what few folks in our country and around the world actually know about Alaska North Slope Exploration. There are more than a few politicians who would benefit from reading it as well... -- Jim Barkdull
This is the story of early adventurers sleeping under wolf skin blankets, shivering while trekking across ice and tundra in 1900, and whose findings ultimately led their followers along the greatest path of petroleum exploration geology. Atlantic Richfield Company, ARCO, followed this path and found the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field, biggest in North America and probably never to be surpassed on land.
John M. Sweet has written the first history of the Prudhoe Bay oil discovery. This is the inside story that lets you experience the cold, the logistics, and years later, after the decisions are made to drill or not to drill, you are given a pass into the boardrooms - you are a mouse in the wall. If you are an exploration petroleum geologist as I am, you soon realize that this is a page-turner. But for the non-oil folks, John successfully treads the line between the reader off the street and geologists who were not involved. For the man on the street I tried to give enough Geology 101 for them to understand what oil exploration is all about.
John Sweet's book begins with a bang with a foreword by Walter J. Hickel, Alaska's second governor, who says, This is the story of one of the greatest adventures of the twentieth century. That is putting it mildly. John's beginning simply states the obvious, The inside story leading to the discovery of the Prudhoe Bay oil field has never been told. Readers will be surprised that there is much to be learned.
John's has organized his book into 16 chapters, each in itself a comprehensive short story characterizing the steps, taken in historical order of the geological studies of northern Alaska, beginning in 1900 with oil as the ultimate objective, and which headed to the discovery - the ARCO-Humble Prudhoe Bay State No. 1 spudded on April 22, 1967 at 7:30 in the morning.
Included maps, geological cross sections and photographs provide the reader with visuals of the early surveys and surveyors, explorers, scenery, rivers, mountains, and concomitant color photos that take you into the 60s with planes, mountains, roads, and the exploration folks. The reader will be especially entertained while viewing photo #18 on page 216 - a picture of a large rock to wit: Photo 18. A large example of a large oil-stained rock from the Arctic National Wildlife Area (ANWR). Hmmmmmmm! (The Hmmmmmmm! is the reviewer's.)
There is no more entertaining reading of a true adventure fully documented and realized in this book.
Note: Mr. Barkdull is a petroleum geologist living in Colorado.
------------------------------------------------------
Voice of the Times
Review by Tom Brennan Editor of The Anchorage Times
Sept 2008
An ARCO geologist tells story of Prudhoe Bay
John Sweet and his friends discovered one of the greatest treasure troves of the 20th Century - the huge oil and gas field at Prudhoe Bay.
Sweet is a geologist and was district explorationist for ARCO when the company's drilling rig probed for and reached the oil-soaked formation about two miles below the Arctic tundra. It changed Alaska and the American economy with the largest oilfield ever discovered in North America.
Sweet and his team were salaried employees and didn't get to keep what they found, but they could and did keep the memories and stories of a lifetime. Theirs was the culmination of an adventure story that began years before most of them were born.
Sweet is long retired and living in Boulder, Colorado. He has written a remarkable book, entitled Discovery at Prudhoe Bay, from his own experiences, from stories recounted by friends and from the journals of early Arctic explorers who were looking for something potentially more precious than oil or gold.
Two of the best known (in professional circles) of the early pioneers, Ernest deKoven Leffingwell and Ejnar Mikkelsen, sailed into the Arctic in search of the fabled land mass believed to exist north of Alaska. Their ship was irretrievably damaged by ice, so they pulled it apart and used the planks to build a house.
(cont'd from front page) for themselves on Flaxman Island in what is now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
After that, most of their travel was by dog sled across Arctic sea ice, a harrowing journey in which almost all of their dogs contracted rabies (the dogs that recovered went back to work) and the pack ice cracked and leads opened under them. One night a lead opened under a tent between two sleeping bags.
Leffingwell and Mikkelsen were disappointed when they didn't find land beyond Alaska, but they returned to Flaxman and began exploring and mapping the geology of the North Slope. Leffingwell stayed at Flaxman for 12 years, returning once to the Seattle area and once to the U.S. Geological Survey in Washington, D.C., returning north each time. After the first few years at Flaxman, Mikkelsen returned to Washington to begin a long-planned study of Greenland.
There were many others, who came to Alaska in search of gold and were drawn to the Slope by reports from traders who said Eskimos were talking about oil seeps they saw on the tundra. Later, drilling rigs arrived but mostly they drilled near the seeps, which are on the western end of the North Slope.
The drillers found little of commmercial value and most of the rig owners stacked their equipment in hopes that other oil companies would hire them for more new ventures. Moving them into the Arctic was expensive and hauling them out would have been prohibitive. Better to wait and hope they could do a little more business there first.
In late 1966 ARCO, in partnership with Humble Oil & Refining (which later became Exxon Mobil) hired one of the stacked rigs and moved it to an untapped wildcat location near the mouth of the Sagavanirktok River.
The geology of the area looked promising and ARCO's seismologists said the rock formations could hold oil, a lot of it. But the area was so far from the acreage that other companies had drilled (unsuccessfully) that Sweet's peers in other companies scoffed at their bold venture, saying the company would go broke.
But in late 1967 the rig encountered first gas, then oil. Further drilling and tests over the next few months proved that ARCO had found the big one. The size of the discovery was believed in 1968 to be only five to 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil, but turned out to be much bigger. It has already produced more than 12 billion barrels and isn't done yet.
The book includes a foreword by former Gov. Walter J. Hickel which begins with these words: This is the story of one of the greatest adventures of the twentieth century. Few books are being written about it, because the heroes aren't poets.
Hickel's comment is absolutely appropriate. But John Sweet is a poet - by geologist standards - and he tells a sweeping story about the early pioneers and the incredible hardships they endured. They are the ones who paved the way for the ARCO drillers, who lived in relative comfort compared to the lives of Leffingwell and Mikkelsen.
But the oilmen's ingenuity and innovative spirit was phenomenal, as was the courage of the company executives who risked their careers and their fortunes to find the oil they fervently believed was there.
Sweet decided to write this book after Charlie Selman passed away in 1999. Selman was a geophysicist and one of the key figures in the discovery at Prudhoe Bay. He later became better known to the public as the jovial proprietor of Anchorage's Club Paris, where he bought an interest after retiring from the oil patch.
Selman's passing convinced Sweet that the stories of the pioneers were being lost and it was time to collect those that he didn't have and put them together in this most appropriate form, an adventure story.
Sweet's scientific training does show through and causes him to tell more than you might want to know about the relevance of a sled dog's rectal temperature to its ability to travel long distances. But he quickly returns to the role of geologist-poet and to the fascinating overall story.
In the interest of full disclosure, John Sweet is an old friend and co-worker. I worked at ARCO from 1969 until 1980 and knew or knew about many of the people whose stories he tells. That piqued my interest in the book, but I think anyone interested in the history of Alaska and Prudhoe Bay will find this a worthwhile read.
Discovery at Prudhoe Bay costs $19.95 and is just starting to reach bookstores. It can be ordered directly from Hancock House Publishers at www.hancockhouse.com and is available on Amazon.com.
Review By Peggy Williams
Dec. 8, 2008
Prudhoe Bay Discovery Captured In Engaging Book
I'm an exploration geologist, and I love stories of discoveries. Recently, I received a review copy of a book, Discovery at Prudhoe Bay, about the work that led up to the inaugural test that found the continent's biggest oilfield.
Author John M. Sweet, a retired geologist, was district explorationist for Arco (Atlantic Refining) during the discovery. He's pulled together a fascinating story that details not only the scientific underpinnings of the find, but also describes the colorful and hearty group of adventurers and scientists that made it happen.
Long before the massive Prudhoe Bay prospect was even delineated, decades of field work by USGS and private-company geologists on the North Slope laid the early building blocks. My favorite character in the narrative was Ernest Leffingwell. This loner, son of an Episcopal clergyman, spent six and a half years in the early 1900s traveling to or working in Arctic Alaska. The book offers some tremendous black-and-white photos from the intrepid explorer.
After World War II, the U.S. Navy engaged in a long prospecting venture on the Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4, now the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
The Navy spent nine years exploring the region, and came up with a familiar technical success-economic failure story.
What it found was enough to entice private oil companies to look more closely, however. Beginning in 1963, companies drilled 14 dry holes scattered along the foothills of the Brooks Range and on the coastal plain. A major disappointment was a duster drilled on the impressive Colville High. This classic prospect seemingly possessed all the attributes needed for a major accumulation, but was dry. The decision to drill Prudhoe Bay was seen by some as the last good shot at finding a major field in the region.
Sweet delivers the inside story of that discovery. He pictures the risks and uncertainties that surrounded the wildcat, and glimpses of the giddy realizations that the big idea actually worked, and worked far better than anyone expected.
So, if you have someone in the oil business, or from Alaska, or simply an armchair reader that enjoys a good story on your Christmas list, you might want to present them a copy of this book. It's available from at www.hancockhouse.com if you're interested.
by Peggy Williams, Senior Exploration Editor, Oil and Gas Investor |
