MR. BOB LOEFFLER: Thank you. Well, it's an honor to be up here as the local boy among all sort of international scholars. And of course what I'd like to say is how Alaskans recognize global warming and have decided to do something about it, but that isn't really what happened. What really happened, and what I'm here to talk about is that in part climate change and other things, had a problem that Alaskan government and industry had to deal with. And so this is really how we dealt with the problem specifically. It is a type of response (Bob Loeffler PowerPoint presentation).

Now my wife saw the introduction to my title slide and she said, let's see, you have warmer tundra, better industry, better government, so you're now going to tell me that we have happy caribou too? And in fact, that's what happened. But the problem I'm going to talk about is that Alaskans all know that when we explore for oil in the winter we do it on frozen tundra. And the tundra is warming and what is our response to that? I think industry and government crafted a response that protects the environment and did well for all of us.

So what I'm going to do, once I figure out the laptop here, is do three things. Give you a one or two minute description of really how industry explores shore oil and therefore what the problem is. And then I'm going to go over the response by government and industry. There we go.

When we explore for oil in the arctic in the winter, we do it to protect the tundra. And there are really two kinds of winter travel up on the North Slope. There is the widely dispersed winter travel which is seismic work. So here's an example of Challenger and laying cable for I think 3-D seismic exploration. And there's been about 16,000 miles of seismic lines outlined on the North Slope in the winter in the decade preceding 2001. So it's a lot of travel and you need to protect the tundra from ruts and warming caused by travel.

The second kind of travel they do is in a particular location where you build an ice road. Where you're going to do an exploration well, you can't go out on just the snow. What you do is you build an ice road that will take highway vehicles and vehicles that actually that aren't highway certified because they're carrying very heavy stuff. And apparently polar bears sometimes enjoy them too.

Here is the problem. And the problem is that our winter work season has been shortening. That in the early 1970s the winter work season was about 206 days. By 2002 it was down to 103 days. Now a 50 percent decrease in the winter work season is a serious economic problem for the industry and it's a serious economic problem for all of us Alaskans who really rely on the industry.

Now I can't stand up here and say that that was all global warming, that was all climate change. I think that was three things. Between 1970 and today we certainly have much stricter environmental standards. So that's part of the closing. Second of the reason that the season got shorter was in part due to an unsophisticated way that we measured it. A lack of understanding of the tundra so we were unable to measure it to figure out exactly when to let people go out. And the third is of course changing weather patterns. And I think the warming climate on the tundra has been documented by the University of Alaska, Professor Romanovksy and others. And it's clear that that is a problem too. But I can't tease out which portion of this is directly related to climate change. Others that have think that it's about the 30 to 45 days. So what government does in this situation is our responsibility is to not let companies out until the tundra is frozen with enough snow to protect the environment.

Just to show you a little bit of what this does, this is a 1970s era road. Something that would happen. This is a peat trail road that you see going off in the distance. And the road and the little lakes on either side of that will be there for essentially ever.

Here is an ice road, first summer after construction. There all that you see is a slight change in color. And actually, the greener area is mostly likely where the road was. What actually happened is when you compress the vegetation, the green stuff springs back and the dead stuff stays down, so you end up for the first couple of years seeing green trails.

So we were successful, I believe, in protecting the environment but at the same time there was an economic cost. And that cost was that graph, the cost was a rapidly shrinking winter season.

So Alaskans, industry and government, had three responses. One response for ice roads, the roads that you build out on the tundra. One is for really the seismic openings which occur all through the tundra. But then there's a general response and that is better industry practices and equipment. A lot of it has changed not because of what government does, it's just because there's a different ethic on how to do things better. And I would like to just briefly go through these starting with ice roads.

Ice roads. Our strategy was pre-packing. Now let me explain how we do that. What we do is we help nature. What nature does is it freezes the tundra so that you can drive vehicles out on it to create an ice road, which is really water trucks to build up the ice. But when snow occurs it insulates the tundra. So what you do is you go plow it, if you will. You break up that snow and you break up the insulating layer which lets the cold penetrate. So then whereas the general tundra takes a little while to warm up, or to cool down, if you will, because you have snow insulating it, in the area where you have decreased that insulation the cold drives the frost into the ground and it's ready for ice road building earlier.

This is an example of one of the pieces of equipment rolling along and side casting water which is what they do to build an ice road. That's a low impact piece of equipment which protects the tundra while they're doing the building so they can go out a little earlier. But the results of this pre- packing, since 1997, is industry has been able to get out about 30 days earlier to build ice roads. Now that's a big deal on 100, 120, 130 day season, to increase that window by 30 days.

Last year in 2005 ConocoPhillips built Alaska's longest ice road, a 78 mile road into NPRA. So I think we've been very successful with respect to ice roads and responding to this problem by getting people out earlier.

Let me go to my favorite part which is the part I was involved in, and that's for seismic openings. For seismic openings, the general tundra opening that we do throughout the North Slope, or DNR does it for state land. And we took a research project that was in collaboration with Alaska Oil & Gas Association, Department of Energy at Yale University, University of British Columbia, and with significant help from the member industries of oil and gas, particularly ConocoPhillips and significant help from a lot of the Alliance industries, oil exploration, let me generally describe what we did.

Well, we figured out part of the our problems. We didn't understand when we could let people go out. So what we did is we took some plots and representative ecological situations and we trashed them. Or we tried to trash them. Now what that means is we took engineered plots where we measured the ecological characteristics and let characteristic pieces of equipment go out in October, at Halloween, when we knew the tundra wasn't cold enough, and then we did it again about every half month through mid January, to see if we could understand precisely what ecological characteristics we could measure that would say now is the time we can go out.

The kinds of things we measured were depth of active layer, how it changes, soil temperature of ruts, things like that. And so what we expected to see was in October when we let people go out we expected to see ruts, we expected to see the next year a very big increase in active layer, things that would cause rutting or (indiscernable). And as we got closer to January, in fact we'd see less and less.

Well, in fact we didn't get quite what we expected but we got a lot of things that really helped. This is an example of a Tucker and it's going through a gate, if you will. You see the two side posts on either side of the Tucker. And across that gate we did a transect. We measured before, during and after the changes in active layer and all the ecological characteristics. And we found a couple of things.

We found a lot less change than we expected in the tundra, which gave us more confidence. We found that snow depth was more important than we previously thought in terms of protecting the tundra. And we ended up being able to develop a predictive model that said if you go out in these conditions you'll end up with these kinds of effects.

And that level of sophistication gave DNR the confidence to be able to do a couple of things. To measure the things so we can precisely say here is now when you can go out. And we measure them in different areas of the North Slope so we can open areas as they come open.

This is kind of what we ended up with. It's my version of a scientific graph. And the way the tundra freezes, when it gets cold in the early fall the tundra falls below zero degrees C, below freezing, but it stays at about a half a degree below freezing as the water freezes. The North Slope tundra is between 40 and 70 or 80 percent water. So as that freezes the latent heat of freezing keeps the tundra right at about zero degrees for about 40 days. And once most of that water is frozen, all of it that's going to freeze, freezes, the hardness dramatically increases. The hardness increases and the temperature decreases. And that occurs in about 10 days. So once you see the tundra temperature start to fall, you expect that in roughly 10 days you're going to have a hardness that is as hard as you need.

And so on that graph, if you will, what we had been doing is letting people go out on the tundra further to the right waiting to it to get even colder than what we needed. And what we need is about minus 5 degrees C for maximum hardness, and a certain amount of snow.

Now the result of that, in 2002, before we started using that we had a 104 day season. In 2005 we opened the tundra significantly earlier, we had 161 day season. Significantly longer. And a part of that was a colder winter. And then we went out and did unmarked plots to see whether letting folks out earlier had had an ecological effect. And we found that it didn't. That our statistical samples really showed no change.

This year, what we're calling winter '96 [sic], even though the tundra opened in December, the Coastal Plain opened December 6th which is the earliest since 1995. So we've been able to extend the tundra for Alaskans, for the oil companies in a way which I think protects the environment, does well for Alaska and does well for industry.

Now I've been talking about government and industry helping government grapple with the science, but it's important to say that really industry practices have changed. That's both help the environment and allow them to go out earlier. And let me give you a couple of examples. One is -- as I showed a picture of that Roll-A-Gon side casting water, that's a low impact vehicle. And by going to low impact vehicles or vehicles with different tread types, they've been able to increase the environmental ethic in a way that protects the environment.

And we realized this, or it came to a head in a couple ways while we were doing this study. One is that when we first got out there and we had these big machines that were going to go in tight figure eights to try to make changes in the environment that we could measure, the drivers were sort of horrified. They said you want us to do that? Are you sure you want us to do that? We don't think you want us to do that. And we convinced them that yes, we did want them to do that. And you wouldn't have had that discussion 15 years ago. You just wouldn't have had that discussion. And the result of that of course is a better environment. That is the ethic has gone down to the driver level, and that's important. Let industry go out earlier and it's protected the environment.

A second example is while we were doing the data analysis we had some hot-shot data character from Yale who's doing a lot of our analysis. And he came and said I don't understand it, there's a bump in the data right here. The only thing I can explain is did you change drivers on the loader in the fourth test? And, you know, the guy who ran this said I don't know, and went back and looked at his notes. And he said yeah, we did. And in fact, that level, the driver of the machinery makes an impact. And so when I think of our response to the problem created by climate change on the North Slope, I think of industry and government working together for pre- packing. I think of our work for the tundra travel model helped by industry and helped by scientists. And then I also think of the general practices in the way environmental ethics have changed over the last 10 to 15 years. And that's it. Thank you.

JANIE LEASK: Well, we could have gone on for another half hour this morning, but we really do appreciate the panel. We do have something, a little gift for you which I'll give you in just a minute.

Just in closing, if you are a guest today, once again welcome. Commonwealth North is a membership organization. We really do appreciate your support. We have another presentation on Global Climate Change, that's going to be on Friday in conjunction with the World Affairs Council. It will be here at the Hilton in the Anchorage Chart Room. And that will be at noon. And we will have at that time the Inuit Circumpolar Conference Chair Sheila Watt-Cloutier. And Sheila will be our guest speaker.

So for our members and guests, we really do appreciate you coming out this early in the morning. Thank you very much for your attention. We're sorry we weren't able to get to the questions that you posed. I'd like again to thank our guests. And we stand adjourned. Thank you.

(END OF PROCEEDINGS)