A Citizen’s Guide

To the editor:

While attending one of the gas line hearings in May, I visited the displays of the various oil companies. I needed to get an answer to something I have wanted to know for a while.

First I asked the ConocoPhillips fellows at their booth. “Something I’d really like to know is this: What is the geological age of the oil on Alaska’s North Slope?” The Conoco boys didn’t know the answer, so they called over a gal from BP. She admitted she didn’t know either, but, cell phone to the rescue. She whips out her cell phone and calls an engineer at BP, and gleefully announces, “It’s about 200 million years old. The Sadlerochit formation (the one that has the oil), is Triassic (a geologic era), and somewhere around 200 million years old.”

I find this fact just overwhelming. I can’t even express how that affects my attitude toward oil. Oil that is 200 million years old deserves a bit more respect than we typically give it. That oil is older than the peak era of the dinosaurs. Once I realized our oil is so inconceivably old, I just had to tell everyone. The Legislature should certainly get a new oil tax system in place and get the absolute most we can for that ancient black gold.

One more stunning fact, this one from www.petropeak.com:

“It would take an average person about 600 hours to perform the work that can be obtained from one gallon of gasoline. That is 15 40-hour work weeks. If this is hard to believe, try pushing a 4,000 pound SUV about 20 miles. If you paid someone minimum wage to do this same amount of work, it would cost more than $3,000. Maybe oil is worth more than we are paying.”

Valuable stuff, oil, and Alaska’s will mostly be gone in 10 to 20 years. Tax it for what it’s really worth now. It’s in your hands, legislators.

Rich Seifert

Fairbanks