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Two decades ago, when Dutch oil giant Shell was poking holes in the ice-clogged Arctic Ocean, Rick Fox was a young buck managing the company's drilling rigs.
Some of the holes hit oil, and Fox and the other oil men felt pretty good about what they found.
But none of the discoveries was developed -- the price of oil was too low and the finds too remote -- and Shell abandoned Alaska's Arctic.
Now Fox, 55, and Shell are mounting an aggressive return to the polar ocean, staking hundreds of millions of dollars to lease vast offshore acreage, staff an Anchorage office and assemble a flotilla of drilling ships to sink more holes in the Beaufort Sea.
The reason for the return is the high price of oil plus potential for big discoveries, says Fox, now the company's Alaska asset manager.
"Conditions are right for us to re-enter and give it another shot," he says. "And we are committed in a very big way."
If Shell and other companies that might follow are successful, they could open a vast frontier and ignite a potentially dazzling new era for Alaska's most important industry, oil and gas.
But getting there has proven difficult. Last week, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco dealt what could be a death blow to Shell's drilling plans -- at least for this year.
Citing "serious questions" raised by the North Slope Borough, Native whale hunters and national environmental groups, a three-judge panel ruled Shell can't drill until petitions opposing the project are resolved.
According to the court's schedule for the case, that will take until early December at best. By then the Beaufort Sea likely will be frozen, locking out Shell's drilling ships.
The opponents raise a complex set of objections, but they center on fears that industrial noise and spills could disturb or harm endangered bowhead whales, polar bears, fish and birds that sustain an ancient Inupiat subsistence culture.
They accuse regulators in a Bush administration eager to boost U.S. oil production of giving short shrift to the risks.
With the court order, which extends an earlier stay imposed July 19, Shell's drilling fleet sits idle in Dutch Harbor and a Canadian bay at great expense.
Shell spokesmen say the company is weighing its legal options and isn't mothballing its fleet just yet.
Gov. Sarah Palin decried the court order, calling it "a threat to our economic future."
North Slope Borough Mayor Edward Itta, himself a whale hunter, says he's just glad the court is listening to the concerns opponents have raised.
"From the beginning, we have opposed offshore development," he says.
Federal geologists estimate the Beaufort Sea, along Alaska's northern edge, and the neighboring Chukchi Sea, stretching west to Russia, could yield more than 14 billion barrels of oil at current prices. That's more than the nation's biggest field, Prudhoe Bay, has produced so far.
Yet despite their potential, the Arctic waters have been lightly explored compared with other offshore oil provinces.
According to the U.S. Minerals Management Service, an Interior Department agency that regulates offshore exploration, only 30 exploration wells have been drilled in the Beaufort and five in the Chukchi. By comparison, thousands of wells have been drilled in the Gulf of Mexico, which has a vigorous offshore oil and gas industry.
While some oil has been produced from the shallows along the North Slope shoreline, not much has come from beyond three miles out -- waters under federal jurisdiction. Only the Northstar field, which Shell discovered in 1983 but now belongs to BP, produces oil offshore.
Because the offshore is so forbidding and devoid of a pipeline network to transport the oil, discoveries must be huge -- perhaps even a billion barrels -- to justify the cost of development, says Ken Boyd, a former state oil and gas director now work
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