The Beast Tumbles

ConocoPhillips, in spite of what common sense tells them, is going to drill for oil/gas in the Alaskan Arctic. It’s still cold in winter even as the Arctic warms part of the year. The Northern Arctic surface environment and the living creatures there are not compatible with industrial drilling that disrupts the land, humans and other sentient creatures.

Now, it’s a toss-up if the irrational drive to despoil comes from the irreducible logic of late capitalism or the dark freudian pull of Thanatos (he’s pretty much Josh Brolin’s death god Thanos in the Marvelverse and the death drive in the freudverse, though Freud never used that term in his prose, only in convo with his closest posse. In our miserable, real-world timeline, if the death drive took human form it would look exactly like Stephen Miller).

These days put your $$ on late klepto-capitalism — and sorrowfully, the resulting ConocoPhillips’ drive for profit also means burning the planet to an even more dangerous-for-the-living overheated climate.

Last year, Trump’s Department of the Interior (DOI) granted approval for the fossil fuel company to explore opportunities for drilling in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. The Reserve is 24 million acres of the most undisturbed public lands in America. It’s on the Alaskan North Slope, owned by the federal government, west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Reserve is managed by DOI’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), currently being run by acting director Bill Groffy. Groffy is what the hacks at the American Petroleum Institute (API) call a seasoned, strategic vet since he was a top lobbyist for the Colorado Oil and Gas Association and a flack for Marathon Oil. Bill would be the guy in Landman that Billy Bob Thornton would toss out the nearest open window for being “strategic.”

Last December, the Sovereign Inupiat for a Living Arctic, the Wilderness Society and the Center for Biological Diversity slapped a lawsuit on DOI and strategic Bill by name, objecting to the federal government’s approval process. Sovereign Inupiat for Living Arctic is a grassroots organization representing Inupiat Peoples, Alaskan Natives whose traditional territory spans the Norton Sound on the Bering Straits to the far north of the Canadian and American borders. The Inupiat are related to a larger group of people that span Russia, across Alaska and into northern Canada and even much in the news Greenland. They were the first people to make contact with European explorers in Alaska and worked with whalers from New Bedford when whale oil was a prized economic product.

Historians suggest that the Inupiat have been in northern Alaska, surviving on whale, fish and caribou since the 12th or 13th century. So they’ve been around a lot longer than Bill Groffy or ConocoPhillips or even the ancient, aphasic Brain Damaged-in-Chief — the only fish he eats being McDonald’s Filet o’ Fish, an ounce of pollack, a pound of sugar+corn starch.

A key element of the lawsuit being pressed by Earthjustice who represents the plaintiffs, is that the feds failed to properly assess how damaging the impacts of ConocoPhillips’ explorations would be for the hunting and fishing rights of the Inupiat tribes.

This isn’t ConocoPhillips’ first rodeo. They’re always on the Top 20 polluters list, kind of a K Pop band of greenhouse gas befouling. The list of the company’s bad actions go long+deep but a few recent highlights include:

— a 1977 spill in the North Sea at a Phillips Petroleum (a predecessor firm) offshore oil rig, which released 180,000 barrels of crude oil;

— in 1980, 123 workers were killed when a Phillips-operated rig capsized, you guessed it, in the North Sea — the rig’s collapse was due to a crack in one of its struts. The rig was being used as a floating housing dormitory;

— in 1989, a huge explosion outside Houston at a Phillips petrochemical plant resulted in the deaths of 25 workers and 120 other injuries. OSHA uncovered an internal company document that called for a change of course prior to the explosion but it was ignored. It was reported that the company paid out over $300 million in private civil actions;

— 2 spills in 2011 discharged 30,000 gallons of oil and 110,000 gallons of oil-based drilling mud into China’s Bohei Sea. They settled with China for $350 million and were sued separately by an association of Chinese fisherman in U.S. federal court;

— in 2025, Australian regulators found that a storage tank near Darwin has leaked over 400 pounds of methane an hour, the equivalent of putting 8,000 new cars on the road annually. ConocoPhillips dumped the white elephant into the lap of a gas company called Santos. Santos lost a cool $2 billion when it tried to sell the brimming methane bubble to Abu Dhabi of all places.

In 1976, Congress passed the Reserves Act which transferred ownership+jurisdiction of the Reserve from the Navy to Interior. DOI was given responsibilities to restrict or prohibit activities that would create “adverse effects on the surface resources” of the world-class wildlife and scenic values of the area. Some regions within the Reserve with significant resource values are designated Special Areas. BLM can simply reject a proposal to drill in these Special Areas on the presumption that the environmental impacts are destructive unless oil activity can be proven to have “minimal adverse effects on…resource values.”

BLM is required to document its evidence and reasons to override this presumption as well as to provide a list of alternative practices that can mitigate these impacts. BLM is also required to submit the public maps that show where ConocoPhillips winter drilling will take place. In a shock to no one, Groffy failed to do any of this. Neither BLM or ConocoPhillips responded to FOIA requests from the Wilderness Society asking for these maps and documents about the drilling program.

BLM did publish its draft environmental assessment (EA) of the winter exploration plans just before Thanksgiving. But, no thanks, they didn’t tell any of the groups that had filed FOIA requests that the draft EA was even filed. They provided a week for the public to comment. Groups, including some of the plaintiffs, asked for an extension of 23 days to read the EA and prepare comments. Radio silence from the BLM. The plaintiffs submitted public comments anyway to get on the record their concerns.

On Nov. 26, BLM issued its final EA, giving its approval for ConocoPhillips to move ahead with its oil drilling exploration program. They never told the plaintiffs that the final EA was even completed. But they did say that the final EA had an appendix Z which responded to all the comments+concerns of the public. Except the appendices end at J. Who said Colorado Bill has no sense of humor?

There has been a partisan battle in the last decade or so in the fight to protect the Reserve. In 1977, DOI designated Teshekpuk Lake in the northern region of the Reserve, a Special Area. That area will be under duress given the current winter exploration scheme. In 2013, Obama’s BLM expanded that Special District and its protections by 2 million acres. In 2020, Trump’s BLM, already with an eye to handing out oil drilling leases, shrunk the Special Area’s boundaries. In 2022, the Biden administration restored it to the 2013 scope for the expressed purpose of protecting the shorebird and caribou habitats. Both are central to the subsistence of the Inupiat.

But there’s a bi-partisan history of responsibility to all of this. In 2023 Biden gave the go-ahead for the ConocoPhillips Willow Project in the Reserve. Candidate Biden in 2020 had promised not to allow any drilling on public lands. The opposition rose quickly. Within days, a Change.org petition had over 3.5 million signatories in opposition to the project. Christy Goldfuss at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) said that Biden’s decision “green-lights a carbon bomb and…emboldens an industry hellbent on destroying the planet.”

Oil prices had spiked at that point because of the Ukraine war. Biden aggressively pushed the oil industry to increase domestic production to lower costs. Willow was part of that oil boosterism strategy. When oil prices escalate wildly, the oil oligarchs throughout history control, as we now say, the narrative.

Even the Native population was divided. Unsurprisingly those Alaska Natives close to the Willow drilling were truculently hostile to the project but other Native villages and corporations, dependent on oil revenue for local government budgets, have supported ConocoPhillips.

Still, sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. Last week, a Doyon Drilling Inc rig (DDI, a Native corporation that has worked for Exxon and Hilcorp which is owned by far right, massive Trump donor moneybags Jeffrey Hildebrand), operating on behalf of ConocoPhillips, toppled off an icy, gravel road into the tundra. Part of the rig caught fire. 8 workers were hospitalized. According to DDI, about 4,000 gallons of diesel fuel was released as was 600 gallons of hydraulic oil. A coolant tank also might have leaked but otherwise everything is cool.

The fallen rig, Doyon 26, is lovingly called (at least by Doyon) “the Beast.” It is the largest oil drilling rig in North America. Crews from man camps (flashback to those halcyon days of fracking man camps which brought mega-doses of drugs+violent mayhem to fracked communities everywhere but these are much better bases/gulags I’m sure!) worked 12-hour shifts to assemble this monster. The rig’s main trailer alone weighed 2 million pounds and had eight separate engines in its generator room. Each engine was between 2-3,000 hp, a lot of energy for the big hungry guy.

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy reported on his Facebook page (his Comms tool of choice apparently) that there was “minimal damage to the environment” and more importantly “no impact to oil infrastructure or facilities.” No impact at all except the 165 foot tall, 10 million pound Beast now broken in two, splattered on the tundra, leaking diesel, hydraulic oil+coolant chemicals.

ConocoPhillips VP Barry Romberg said it “was a very sad day. The Doyon 26 rig was a very special rig for us.” Like losing a member of the ConocoPhillips family actually. The first stage of grief is drilling, the second stage is denial, nothing to see here, the third stage is cover-up…

For now, no repairs are being made on the Beast. The massive chunks of metal still peeling off the Beast make its carcass too unstable for responders to approach it so maybe it will settle into the ice and become a tourist attraction.

Probably Goffy+the BLM should have read those comments. Several of the commenters recommended ways to mitigate the dangers of traveling over the tundra. One suggestion was to prohibit u-turns by exploration equipment on ice roads. Also it was recommended that the oil company build a snow road for all incoming machinery, likely to avoid the less stable gravel road that took down poor old Beast. Another recommendation was to build zero wells in the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area. Avoid it completely.

One main concern expressed is that the ground+air traffic, overall noise and habitat disruption of the oil exploration process combined with the construction of the ongoing Willow Project will both displace and put in danger the caribou herds in the Special Area. The Inupiat villagers rely on caribou as a staple more than fish or whale; if Native hunters cannot get enough caribou meat to feed their families and villages, the impacts will be severe and far reaching.

One commenter cautioned that there wouldn’t even be 6 inches of snow cover throughout the winter, the minimum snow levels needed to prevent harm to the tundra from all the industrial pounding to come.

Maybe BLM responded to all these comments in Appendix Z, which is sitting on the same table as the Maltese Falcon+the Holy Grail. Or they don’t have answers and don’t care. Remember, the Phillips of ConocoPhillips once lost 123 workers when an oil rig capsized because of a design flaw. That was a sad day too but the circus packed up and moved on to other towns, other explosions, other fires and disasters. Now they plan to fill the dark northern Alaska winter with aircraft, derricks and drilling rigs. But the Arctic has plans of its own. That’s one reason why there’s 10 million pounds of useless metal abrading on the melting tundra.