ALASKA WAKE-UP CALL

The shutdown of a major oil field in Alaska should vividly remind Americans of a pressing problem. The United States uses a quarter of the world’s oil but has only 3 percent of its oil reserves.

With the largest single source of those reserves temporarily shut down, oil prices have already risen nearly $2 a barrel. Drilling for more oil, in Alaska or elsewhere in the United States, won’t improve the situation. Conservation and energy efficiency are the only real answers.

Earlier this week, BP, the British company that manages the Prudhoe Bay oil field in Alaska, said it was shutting down a pipeline that carries crude oil from the field to the Trans-Alaska pipeline because of corrosion problems. Workers found a small oil spill along the line and company officials said test found 16 anomalies along the 22-mile pipeline.

In some spots, the pipeline wall has lost up to 81 percent of its thickness due to corrosion. The company Monday said it planned to replace 16 miles of pipe and was shutting down the entire Prudhoe Bay field, which produces 400,000 barrels of oil per day, half the amount from Alaska’s North Slope. Oil prices jumped $2 a barrel that day.

The oil BP won’t ship from Prudhoe Bay represents about 8 percent of U.S. production. Worse, it is about a quarter of the world’s totally excess oil capacity, which is about 2 million barrels per day. If there are any more emergencies that severely deplete oil production, demand could exceed supply.

On Tuesday, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said that situation may not be as bad as it seemed and that U.S. oil inventories are larger than last year. He also said the government is ready to release oil from the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve if necessary. This is a temporary fix.

Although the Alaska crisis may pass without oil shortages or further price increases, the United States cannot continue to balance on such a fine line between supply and demand. Congress has debated for decades, and consistently rejected, drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – a prospect now further dimmed by concerns about the integrity of the state’s pipeline system.

The Senate recently approved expanded drilling in the Gulf of Mexico while the House passed a bill lifting the nationwide ban on offshore drilling. Given the debate over ANWR, any attempt to allow widespread offshore drilling is likely to be long.

The only responsible solution that can ease the oil supply problem in the relative short term is conservation and improved energy efficiency. Raising fuel economy standards for cars and trucks is one way to do this. Increasing fuel economy standards to 35 miles per gallon for all vehicles – from the current fleet average of 27.5 for cars and 21 for trucks – would save 2.5 million barrels of oil per day by 2025, the same amount the country now imports from the Persian Gulf. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins have long supported such measures.

Fixing the pipeline in Alaska as quickly as possible is important. Reducing America’s oil consumption is necessary to solve the longer-term problem of our limited supply.