Prudhoe Bay oil field

Prudhoe Bay is a large oil field on Alaska's North Slope, on the Arctic coast of the United States. It covers about 213,500 acres and is the largest oil field in North America by area. It originally held about 25 billion barrels of oil. It lies about 640 km north of Fairbanks and about 400 km north of the Arctic Circle.

The oil field was confirmed on 12 March 1968, when a well, Prudhoe Bay State #1, hit oil. Production began on 20 June 1977, and the oil travels south through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which is about 1,287 km long. A road, the Dalton Highway, links the field with Fairbanks.

Finding it

The area was chosen in the early 1960s as part of 100 million acres that the federal government gave the new state of Alaska. A state employee, Tom Marshall, said the geology reminded him of big oil basins in Wyoming. After years of fruitless drilling, a rig produced a natural gas flare in December 1967, and the next year two companies confirmed oil with the discovery well.

Who runs it

For decades the field was run by BP, with ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips as partners. In August 2019 BP sold all its Alaska assets to the company Hilcorp. The land belongs to the State of Alaska and is leased to the operators. The field lies between the National Petroleum Reserve to the west and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the east.

On the globe

Look for the Arctic coast of northern Alaska, USA.