Environmentalists worried about oil drilling in Alaska

Today Shell Oil and the Bush Administration continued their quest to drill in the Arctic Ocean, and environmentalists continued their fight to prevent it.

Lawyers made their cases before the Ninth circuit court of appeals in San Francisco -- the same court that blocked Shell's drilling plan earlier this year.

An alliance of Eskimo whalers and environmentalists are worried about how drilling might affect the Arctic's natural resources. In particular how it might affect the bowhead whale, which is both endangered and an important food source for the Eskimos.

Royal Dutch Shell wants to find vast oil reserves it believes lie off the coast of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

To do that, it needs to do exploratory drilling in an area about 15 miles offshore in 110-feet of water in the Beaufort Sea.

But a coalition of environmentalists and native Eskimo groups have successfully blocked the plan so far, saying the environmental impact studies are incomplete.

"We want to drill a limited number of wells to understand what is there. What are the possibilities and from there we'll do a full-blown environmental impact statement when we move to a production phase," said Ben Dillon from Shell.

"There has been some exploration drilling but never before with two rigs operating simultaneoulsy with two large ice breakers in addition to additional ice breakers and supply ships," said Deidre McDonnell from Earth Justice.

San Francisco's Ninth Circuit Court of appeals put shell's plan on-hold earlier this year until it could hear arguments from both sides today.

Opponents worry that the drilling area is in the migration route of the endangered bowhead whale.

"Bowhead whales are sensitive to industrial noise, in particular mother with calves can be frightened by noise, they flee from important feeding areas and mothers can be separated from their calves," said McDonnell.

Shell says there will be observers on board, and work will stop when a whale is spotted.

Shell also says it will not interfere with the Eskimos' whale hunting season.

"That agreement with the whaling community said Shell would stop drilling, shut down during the whale hunt and not resume until the whale hunt was completed," said Dillon.

There could be billions of barrels of oil at stake -- but Berkeley Energy Institute's Severein Borenstein says all the oil in the Arctic will not bring down the price for the American consumer.

"It will make up less than 1-percent of the world's oil markets o it will have very little effect on the price of oil and therefore very little effect on the price of gas at the pump," said Severein Borenstein, Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley Energy Institute.

The government estimates there could be 27 billion barrels of oil off Alaska's coast. Not everyone who lives there is opposed to oil production; it is an important part of their economy. The judge's decision is expected sometime in the spring.

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