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ANWR—Two Sides to Every Issue. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Pros and Cons for Drilling. http://healthresearchfunding.org/pros-and-cons-of-drilling-in-anwr/ 6min. ANWR Drilling video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiwZzj_z7yE. Environmental View.
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ANWR—Two Sides to Every Issue Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Pros and Cons for Drilling • http://healthresearchfunding.org/pros-and-cons-of-drilling-in-anwr/ 6min
ANWR Drilling video • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiwZzj_z7yE
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR): Where Caribou Meet Oil Conduits (plus some coal pictures) Above: USGS http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2003/fs014-03/pipeline.html Right: Fish and Wildlife Service http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2003/fs014-03/pipeline.html
Oil and gas aren’t quite as photogenic as mountains or canyons. Here are a few pictures from ANWR, and some shots showing oil wells, coal mines, and the occurrence of oil, gas and coal in the U.S. You might want to know that, with heating, plant turns to peat to lignite to bituminous to anthracite, that western PA has bituminous and eastern PA has anthracite, and that making oil too hot produces natural gas so western PA has oil but eastern PA doesn’t.
Photos from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; photo below hosted on web site of Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy leahy.senate.gov/issues/ environment/caribou.gif http://arctic.fws.gov/index.htm The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (above) and its caribou (right).
Satellite image showing ANWR. To the north (top of picture) sea ice floats in the Beaufort Sea. Below, rivers drain from snow-covered mountains. http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/frozen_north.html
http://geology.usgs.gov/connections/blm/energy/o&g_assess.htmhttp://geology.usgs.gov/connections/blm/energy/o&g_assess.htm Slightly fuzzy USGS map of oil (green), gas (red), and a lot of dry holes (gray) for the U.S. Alaska is reduced to fit; ANWR is at the far north (top) of Alaska.
http://www.ice.gov/graphics/news/insideice/images/oilwell_lg.jpghttp://www.ice.gov/graphics/news/insideice/images/oilwell_lg.jpg Modern Pennsylvania oil well. This happens to be a well that was seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of the U.S. Government as part of investigation of drug crimes. http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/history/people/pioneers.htmlHistorical photo of the world’s first oil well, Drake Well Museum, Titusville, PA.
http://energy.er.usgs.gov/products/databases/USCoal/figure1.htmhttp://energy.er.usgs.gov/products/databases/USCoal/figure1.htm USGS map of coal resources in the contiguous U.S. The numbers and blue lines refer to different coal regions used in USGS studies. 1-3 on the far right are anthracite, 4-8 and 12-23 (shown in green and blue) are bituminous (of various grades; greener colors are closer to lignite, and the red bits in 4 and 7 are close to anthracite), and regions 9-11shown in yellow and orange are lignite.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1143/USGS Circular 1143, Coal—A Complex Natural Resource, above by J.C. Willett, right R.W. Stanton, upper right P.D. Warwick, USGS. Left: coal-fired Navajo power plant near Page, AZ. Upper right: Mining lignite-to-bituminous coal, WY. Lower right: Scientific sampling of Lower Freeport Coal, Indiana County, PA.
Slightly-low-resolution photos of peat from Indonesia (upper left), lignite from Texas (above; the darker beds are coal, lighter are volcanic ash) and bituminous from West Virginia (left; bituminous usually is blacker, but has been weathered here). http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1143/USGS Circular 1143, Coal—A Complex Natural Resource, upper left by S.G. Neuzil, left by C.B. Cecil, above by P.D. Warwick, USGS.
Above from Warwick, Peter D., in preparation, Geologic Assessment of Coal in the Gulf Coastal Plain: U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1625E, CD-ROM. http://energy.er.usgs.gov/NCRA/Gulf_Coast_B.htm Left http://www.usbr.gov/history/dragline.jpg photograph from Colorado, 1914, US Bureau of Reclamation. Draglines (left and top center) often are used to remove unwanted rock above coal in surface (“strip”) mines, such as the Gulf Coast lignite mine shown in the right-hand four pictures, where volcanic-ash interbeds separate the coal beds, with a fossil palm leaf (upper right).