fully realized; namely, to determine the oil potential. That is where we stand now historically.

Mr. ABBOTT. Was that effective in 1953? Had it been done prior to that to cut off in 1953 or was it done in 1953?

Mr. REED. It was done in 1953. It was felt by the operating committee that a reasonable accomplishment of the objective would have been obtained in about 3 more years.

(Discussion off the record.)

Mr. REED. Unless there are further questions, that completes part 1 of what I wanted to tell you, the historical background against which you should view this problem.

Now let us look at it as a geologic entity. And I know you are not technical people and I will try not to use technical terms.

You can compare northern Alaska to a piece of the Rocky Mountain area of the United States and the plains that lie to the east of the mountains. The Brooks Range corresponds geologically to the Rocky Mountains. It is the same mountain lineament, it has the same age, it has the same characteristics.

The Arctic plateaus and the Arctic coastal plain correspond geologically to the area lying east of the mountains, let's say from Denver out into eastern Colorado or Kansas somewhere, just to give you a little visualization.

There are no oil possibilities in the rocks of the mountains, and those rocks we call the basement rocks because they underlie any oil possibilities. Those rocks dip steeply under the surface rocks of the petroleum reserve and extend out under the Arctic Ocean, to where we do not know. They are at the surface at the front of the Brooks Range. Fifty miles north of the front of the Brooks Range those rocks lie at a depth approximating 20,000 feet. They then begin to rise toward the Arctic coast and at Point Barrow the basement rocks are about 3,500 feet below the present surface of the land.

So you can visualize the basin shaped like this: mountains here, the deep part of the basin here, and the basement rocks rising toward the Arctic coast.

Mr. DAWSON. Those mountains, do they pick up after they come out on the other side in Russia?

Mr. REED. This is going northward, not towards Russia.

Mr. DAWSON. The end of it.

Mr. REED. We don't know. The Brooks Range passes into the ocean way north of the Seward Peninsula.

The rocks that fill that basin are marine sedimentary rocks laid down in salt water and have in part the three characteristics that geologically you must satisfy in order to have oilfields. This is assuming that the rocks contain oil, which rocks of that character do. Point No. 1. The rocks must have sufficient porosity to contain oil. Second, the pore spaces must be connected sufficiently to give you what is called permeability, which allows oil to move through the rocks.

Thirdly, there must be a trap which will form a reservoir.

In the simplest terms, a common form of trap is an anticline, one of these overturned canoe-shaped bows in the rock of which we saw a beautiful example as we were flying the other day. And there are hundreds of those anticlinal structures in the area of Public Land Order 82.

The rocks do contain oil. The problem has been from the very start and this was not known until Petroleum Reserve No. 4 started-to satisfy the other two conditions, porosity and permeability.

In general, the rocks that fill the basin I have described are so fine grained that they have little porosity and permeability, which, of course, means that in spite of many, many fine traps there are not as many oil reservoirs. And the course of the exploration program as it went on became one of trying to find the places where there was sufficient porosity and permeability to form oil reservoirs.

Strangely enough, the very first structure that was drilled was one of those and was the best oilfield that was found in the course of operations. But, also in general, the western part has less porosity and permeability than the eastern part. This I think is well to know because it means that the area east of the petroleum reserve may be the most hopeful part of the area of Public Land Order 82.

Mr. ABBOTT. When you say "eastern part" and indicate on the map, Doctor, you are referring to the entire northern part of Alaska above the Brooks Range generally and all to the international boundary line?

Mr. REED. All the way to the 141st meridian, yes.

I think that that gives you a reasonable thumbnail sort of a background of the kind of a problem with which we had to deal during the course of this operation. Now let us go to part No. 3 of what I had to say.

Where do we stand now in regard to the information as it may affect your judgment on Public Land Order 82?

We have one fine, big anticline and a moderate-sized oilfield at Umiat. This particular oilfield is very largely, almost entirely, inside of Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4, and one little end of it sticks outside into the area of Public Land Order 82. The Umiat oilfield is the best known of any of the structures that have been found in northern Alaska and it is reasonably well known.

The oil has two characteristics that are worthy of note because of the geography. First is the fact that the oil is high in the jet fuel, that is the kerosene, fraction, which is one of the big requirements for Air Force use in Alaska.

The other is that the same qualities that make it good jet fuel result in it flowing very freely at very low temperatures. This oil will run like water at almost 60 degrees below zero. It affects the pumping problem in case one ever had a pipeline.

There have been several estimates of the amount of oil in the Umiat structure, and these have been made by very capable companies or individuals. For example, Mr. Eggleston of the Union Oil Co. made an estimate, the Geological Survey made an estimate, De Golyer and McNaughton made an estimate, the Office of Naval Petroleum Reserve made an estimate, and the estimates range from about 20 million barrels, as I recall, to as much as 150 million barrels. All of the estimates were based on the same facts, the same thicknesses, the same porosity measurements, the same pumping tests, and all of the things that went into it. The difference is that the American oil industry has never had any experience with recovering oil from the permafrost zone, so that a factor of judgment came in at that point as to how much of the oil in the rocks can you recover. And

the pessimists were on the low side and the optimists were the 150million-barrel people.

I believe toward the end of the program the general feeling was that there was at least 70 million barrels of recoverable oil from the field and perhaps as much as 150 million barrels.

The oil is rather shallow, and some of the oil sands themselves, about one-third of the reservoir, is within the permafrost zone, which at that point is about a thousand feet thick.

Mr. ABBOTT. At that point, Dr. Reed. You have published and made available all of the data that was assembled as a result of this exploratory work; is that correct?

Mr. REED. You are 50 percent correct only, George. All of that information has been available. None of it is yet published.

will be published but it all is available to the public.

It all

There is a complete file in the Geological Survey in Washington which we keep open to the public by arrangement with Naval Petroleum Reserves, and there is another complete file in Fairbanks, which we also keep under an arrangement with Naval Petroleum Reserves.

There also was found during the course of this program an oilfield at Cape Simpson, right here where the old oil seepages were, about 80 miles east of Point Barrow. That is a much smaller oilfield. The oil is thick, gooey oil, not nearly of the quality of the Umiat oil, and this field is not thought to have any value except perhaps for local use as the years go on, if there is any requirement up there.

Mrs. PFOST. What do you mean by oil seepage? Does it come out of the surface?

Mr. REED. Yes; that is correct, seeping up from a reservoir beneath. Mrs. PFOST. Is there a large quantity or have you investigated sufficiently to know?

Mr. REED. There are about four seepages there. They are areas of residue where the oil has come up and oxidized, the largest seepages. are perhaps an acre in extent. How thick it is, we do not know. Probably a few feet thick. The oil pool as we know it from drilling is perhaps in the nature of 2 million barrels, but a very small field, and the oil is not of high quality.

Mr. TAYLOR. Would that oil be combustible?

Mr. REED. Yes.

Mr. TAYLOR. Highly?

Mr. REED. Like a lubricating oil or something of that nature. There was oil found in a few other of these structures that I have talked about, both inside and outside of the petroleum reserve itself, but none of those shows were considered significant enough to be further tested. So we do not know the extent or the quality or the gas pressure or the number of barrels in some of those other shows.

There also was found right at Point Barrow a small gas field which you heard of at Point Barrow, called the Barrow gas field. As soon as that field had been discovered, it was put on production and the Navy camp was converted from oil burning to gas burning for power, lights, and everything, because it immediately saved a large investment each year in hauling fuel oil up from Seattle. They did have to keep on hand a supply of fuel oil in their tanks for use in an emergency in case the gas well failed. But the gas well did not fail and

was used throughout the rest of the oil exploration program as a main source of power and heat in the camp. Mr. TAYLOR. Are they being used today? Mr. REED. I will come to that right now.

Yes.

At the end of the explanation project the gas well was closed, the valves were turned. It was not torn down but the valves were shut off when the Navy left up here in 1953. The reason for that was that the Air Force had said it was interested in Umiat but it was not interested in Point Barrow. Since that time, with the construction of the DEW line, the Air Force has become very much interested in Point Barrow, and the Air Force contractor now occupies and operates the old Navy camp at Point Barrow, which we drove through but in which we did not stop.

When the facility there was reopened it also was an obvious saving to the Air Force to have gas used rather than haul in fuel oil, and by permission of the Department of the Navy another gas well was put down just this summer. This is very close to the old gas well, cnly a few hundred feet. And the object was not to discover more gas or find a new field or anything of that kind but simply to have two gas wells for greater safety, because there was a little trouble with the first gas well in moisture getting in there and freezing, and they were afraid they might not be able to keep it going. With two they can alternate between one and the other and clean one out while using the other.

Mr. TAYLOR. What depth do you have to drill?
Mr. REED. About 2,300 feet, not too deep.

Just outside of the petroleum reserve, almost the opposite of the Umiat situation, is the Gubik anticline, which is the next anticline north of the Umiat one and lying a little further to the east. That means that the Gubick anticline is almost entirely outside of the petroleum reserve and only one little end of it comes inside. In that way it differs from Umiat. It differs also from Umiat in being very much larger but in being a gas field and not an oil field. And so far as we know there is nothing in Gubik but gas, but there is a lot of gas and it is a large field.

Mr. ABBOTT. Are you able to estimate it?

Mr. REED. A trillion cubic feet. It is a large gas field. We don't know precisely because there are only two holes on it, and we were testing the second well when it blew up and caught fire and burned down.

Mr. TAYLOR. In the Barrow field would there be enough gas so that the Eskimos would be able to make use of it for years and years to come?

Mr. REED. It is a small field but in that community it would last forever.

Mr. TAYLOR. So their request the other day for permission to use that field was well founded and reasonable?

Mr. REED. I would like to clear up one point off the record. (Discussion off the record.)

Mr. REED. I forgot to tell you about one other oil field. East and south of Cape Simpson, in the vicinity of Teshekpuk Lake, out in here [indicating], is an oil field at Fish Creek. The oil is very thick and tarry. It might be a substantial field, but the oil wasn't very

acceptable and the program did not go any further into that field because of the poor quality of the oil. So we don't know how much is there. It probably is not very large, but we don't know.

Now gas also has been found in a number of the anticlinal structures and was not tested because the Navy was not interested in gas. That is the state of the information now except for one point. I discussed here with George a little while ago the fact that you had to plan on a several-year basis. That meant that at the time the program was going into 1953 we had very definite plans of the drilling that would be done in 1954 and in 1955, although it never has been done because of the termination of the program.

Let me also point out that the longer the program went on the more we knew about the environment and the more closely we were able to pinpoint just what we wanted to do next. Therefore the drilling program that had been planned for 1954 and 1955, we feel to be the best drilling program that has yet been planned.

Mr. BARTLETT. The program was not ended because it had been completed?

Mr. REED. No; I tried to make that plain a little while ago.

Now the final drilling for the 1954 and 1955 program was centering around some of the lower sequences of the rocks, the base that I have described, and in most places over the basin those particular rocks. are too deep to be reached readily by a drill. You would have to go to very deep drilling, and that was out of the question in the program because of the expense, and we therefore had moved back closer to the range and farther east.

You recall I said the porosity and the permeability got better as you went farther east, and the closer you get to the range the nearer to the surface those lower rocks are, and there is a very fine structure in there underlain by what we believe to be the best potential reservoir rock that was known.

The geology of the structure has been mapped in detail. The geophysics (seismic exploration) of that structure has been completed, and they were in the process of bringing in the drill when the program terminated. We don't know that that would be an oil field. A professional man would be foolhardy to say it is likely to be, but it was believed, and I believe it to be a very good bet.

Now let me recall, as George has made plain, that the record of this whole program is available publicly. There is no doubt whatever in my mind that the major oil companies know of that particular structure that would have been drilled if the program had gone on. This has not gotten much to your committee's attention because there has been so much talk about Gubik, the gas structure, but I believe it is that structure we were about to drill that will be of real interest to the oil companies, plus many others we haven't had a chance to take a look at.

Mr. ABBOTT. On that point, Dr. Reed, would it be your belief that if the public land order were revoked the Secretary of the Interior, having under the law direction with respect to competitive or noncompetitive bidding-is it your understanding that under the present law it would necessarily be noncompetitive in that eastern area?

Mr. REED. I don't know, George, because my side of the businessis not in the mineral-leasing part. I am connected with resources and not how you handle them in any particular case.