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Edgar Caldwell was in the Gulf of Mexico last summer, working the Deepwater Horizon spill. During that 4.9-million-barrel disaster, as many as 6500 ships were deployed, along with 3 million feet of containment boom. Yet estimates put the total amount of oil recovered or burned at only about 25 percent. During an Arctic Ocean spill that extended into the fall, workers could have to contend with near hurricane-force winds, ice formation, white-outs, severe cold and dark. Given all that, how much oil did he hope to recover if there were a spill? "I think I can get it all," he said.

In the Gulf, Caldwell argued, the oil passed through thousands of feet of water before it reached the surface, giving it more opportunity to disperse. And while the Gulf of Mexico had immense spill-response resources, they took time to deploy. Shell plans to have its primary oil-spill equipment onsite during the drilling. Brent Ross, Shell's Alaska operations manager, made similar points when I spoke with him by phone earlier this year. "In the Gulf, you had thousands of vessels on the payroll that weren't necessarily doing anything. Ninety percent of the oil was collected by 10 vessels," he told me.

Caldwell trains a lot, but he's never practiced with actual crude oil poured into the sea ice. It's illegal in the United States, and I asked whether that should be reexamined. "Part of me says yes, because I want to see how this stuff works," he said. "But part of me says no—it's my water." Caldwell told me that he had grown up in Barrow—his Inupiaq name is Nivikana—and as the conversation continued, he confirmed that he'd been out hunting in seas that would be too rough for his equipment to handle: The Beaufort is nothing like the Bering Sea, he said, but it does get bad up there.

From 2006 to 2009, a Norwegian research organization called SINTEF investigated how well oil-spill response techniques worked in arctic seas, in a program funded by Shell and other oil companies. In contrast to the United States, Norway does allow the occasional discharge of crude into the ocean, and SINTEF conducted what it calls two "large-scale field experiments" in the Barents Sea. In one exercise, researchers poured more than 1800 gallons of oil (equivalent to 44 barrels) into the sea, to study how it dispersed over time. The researchers also ignited about 500 gallons of oil floating in water with 80 percent ice coverage, and tested chemical dispersants, booms and skimmers. The results varied: In-situ burning worked best, while mechanical recovery was the most problematic—ice coverage of even 10 to 20 percent hampered the use of booms. None of the testing took place in severe weather conditions, and, of course, the quantities of oil involved were tiny when compared to a major incident such as the Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez spills.

Marilyn Heiman, the director of the Pew Environment Group's Arctic Program, applauds the research effort, but thinks the industry still has work to do to ensure safety. We met at a tiny Anchorage café called Side Street Espresso so she could talk me through a report on arctic offshore drilling her group released in November 2010. One recommendation was to require full-scale field tests of oil-spill response capabilities in a variety of ice and weather conditions. More broadly, Heiman said she'd like to turn BOEMRE's approach to lease sales inside out—instead of opening tens of millions of acres at a time, she argued for "a surgical approach," in which regulators would pinpoint a few areas to study intensively for potential oil development.

Heiman was a staffer working on oil issues for an Alaskan state legislator when the Exxon Valdez spill occurred in 1989, and she later joined a commission that investigated the disaster. "It took weeks to mobilize a response—nobody had looked at the equipment in years," she told me. Today, she thinks Prince William Sound has the best response capability in the world, largely because it involves fishermen who are experts on the local currents, and who review plans and train to deploy in case of a spill. "None of that is happening yet in the Arctic," she said. "The industry has to listen to the folks who live up there—really listen. Their traditional knowledge is a lot more advanced than our scientific knowledge of that region."


Oil Recovery >>>

Recovering oil spilled in the ocean is so difficult that it can best be considered a last-ditch effort to cope with a profound failure of engineering and management. Preventing that kind of disaster is part of Mitchell Witaker's job. Witaker will oversee Shell's drilling operation if it occurs next summer; he is the very model of a veteran oilfield man. He's spent more than 25 years drilling wells, mainly in the Gulf. He pronounces "mud" very close to "mood," and he can methodically explain the function of every bolt on his oil rigs. Witaker went up to the Mackenzie Delta in the Canadian arctic a few years back to recover the Kulluk, which had been a ghost rig frozen in the ice for almost a decade. It was creepy: Seabirds had used twigs to build nests all over the superstructure; Witaker opened a jar of peanut butter left on a counter and found it still smelled fresh.

If drilling is approved, Witaker's crews in Camden Bay will begin by deploying eight 20,000-pound anchors to secure the Discoverer to the seafloor 80 feet below. They will then use a round bit that measures 22 feet across to drill a 40-foot-deep mud cellar where the blow-out preventer can sit, safe from any ice that might scour the seafloor. The crews will drill to about 200 feet below the mudline, securing 30-inch casing and building the structure that will support the blow-out preventer and other vital equipment, before moving on to deeper drilling. Like a lot of men who have spent their lives doing mechanically sophisticated and potentially dangerous work, Whitaker exudes an aura of sheer competence. As he described the process in detail, it was hard to imagine him ever engaging in the kind of cavalier decision-making that helped doom the Deepwater Horizon.

No matter how responsible Witaker and his colleagues may be, the Inupiaq have a number of concerns about offshore drilling. One is noise: Whales have preternaturally acute hearing, and Inupiaq hunters will paddle miles from shore to avoid spooking the animals with their putt-putt outboards. The company has signed a "conflict avoidance agreement" to leave the area before whaling begins, and has installed underwater acoustic recorders in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas to study its own sound footprint. Executives have pledged to take a wide range of other environmentally sensitive measures, as well.

Most of the Inupiaq I spoke with credited the company with good intentions, but they remained skeptical, in part because of the pressures they already feel. Polar bears are becoming scarce, and international conservation agreements have made it harder for hunters to harvest migratory birds. One resident of Kaktovik told me that scientists, politicians and other visitors to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge flying overhead have been unintentionally spooking the caribou near her town, making those animals harder to hunt. The strongest opposition to the drilling was voiced by Martha Whiting, the mayor of Kotzebue. "The resources will be extracted and someone else will get rich, while we take all the risk," Whiting said during one meeting. "And then you're going to leave. And who's going to be stuck there? My people." Whiting praised Shell for its community outreach—but ultimately the company represents the point of the spear of an industrial world encroaching on the Arctic Ocean, an environment in which it's a minor miracle that the Inupiaq way of life has survived at all. Ironically, while the culture is threatened by oil development, it also has persisted partly because of oil revenues, which have spared Inupiaq villages the dire poverty that affects many native Alaskan communities.

When Whiting and her counterparts left Dutch Harbor to return to their villages, BOEMRE was still considering Shell's permit application. Whaling season was over, the long winter's night was closing in and the sea ice was thickening. It was the start of a long winter, and it was impossible to say what the spring would bring.

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