Ryding’s Blog

Source Notes

Title:

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 1002 Area, Petroleum Assessment, 1998, Including Economic Analysis (The United States Geological Survey (March 7, 2009).

Summary:

In 1987 a report was constructed by the Department of the Interior (DOI) in order to evaluate the potential resources (including petroleum) of the 1002 area in Alaska (also known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge).  Since the report, new developments and studies have been accumulated that provide more reliable statistics into the amount of oil that could potentially be derived from the ANWR.  This source attempts to analyze this new data in order to generate a reliable estimate of the amount of oil that could be produced through drilling on the ANWR.

Topic:

Should the United States experiment with oil drilling on the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) in an attempt to reduce our dependence on foreign oil?

Category:

Institutional, government source

This source is an article featured on the USGS website.

Publication Information:

This article was published on the United States Geological Survey website in April of 2001.

Author:

Kenneth J. Bird, and David W. Houseknecht.

Location:

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-0028-01/fs-0028-01.pdf

Accessed:

I last referred to this website on the afternoon of March 8, 2009.

Support:

U.S. Department of the Interior- conducted original study in 1987 attempting to estimate the amount of fuel derivable from the ANWR.

USGS Fact Sheets- provide information for the charts and tables in this source.

***U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service-

***Bureau of Land Management-

***Minerals Management Service-

***The Alaska Department of Natural Resources (Geolical and Geophysical Surveys, Division of Oil and Gas, and Oil and Gas Conservation Commission)-

Recent 3 year assessment of the ANWR by the USGS- found information contradictory to the service’s original report on the region to Congress in 1987.

(*** These articles are attributed by this source as institutions which provided data for this article, as well as feedback to the USGS on he geology and methodology in the ANWR).

This is a source that relies very heavily on statistics to make its claim.  Nearly every statement is backed up by numbers comparing recent studies to studies that have been developed in the past.  These forms of support do a good job because they are extremely credible organizations that bring with them large amounts of experience and reliability.

Audience and Agenda:

The U.S. Geological Survey is an offshoot agency of the United States Department of the Interior (DOI).  The DOI is directly funded by Congress and the federal government, therefor most of the funding for the U.S. Geological Survey comes indirectly from the federal government.  The USGS was created in order to map, monitor, research, and provide understanding on this nation’s natural resources.  This source, in particular, was created in order to update the information available on the resources present in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, because Congress and the USGS felt as though their previous major study on the ANWR in 1987 was outdated.  It is unclear how many individuals have viewed this article online, but the USGS website reaches an average of 2.7 million American citizens each month, with 30 percent of those users being regulars on the site.  Therefor, the USGS is reaching a relatively large amount of people with their online messages and articles. 

Usefulness:

This document was created in order to give the American public a source for statistics that reflects the fact that the ANWR is an issue that the U.S. is debating right now.  The previous information that was available on natural resources in the ANWR was produced in 1987, and because of that does not seem nearly as valid over 20 years later.  The audience that this article is trying to address are the individuals who are interested in finding a concrete source which conveys the potential that the ANWR has in regards to oil drilling.  The major argument that this article is making is that the general public of the United States is vastly underestimating the amount of oil that could be derived from the ANWR, and because of this we should re-consider the nation’s stance on drilling in this region.  While this article does a good job of providing statistics and studies to validate the information embedded in this source, it fails to account for the reasons why there is such a large gap in the findings between this study and the original 1987 study.  This article could have gone deeper into the fault that is present in the 1987 report, and it would have definitely strengthened the argument.

Works cited:

• U.S. Department of the Interior- conducted 1987 study.

http://www.doi.gov/

• The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website-

http://www.fws.gov/

• The U.S. Department of the Interior: Bureau of Land Managment website-

http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en.html

• The Minerals Management Service website-

http://www.mms.gov/

• The Alaska Department of Natural Resources (Geolical and Geophysical Surveys, Division of Oil and Gas, and Oil and Gas Conservation Commission)-

http://www.dog.dnr.state.ak.us/oil/links/key_sources.htm

• http://www.quantcast.com/- provides statistics on USGS website traffic.

http://www.quantcast.com/usgs.gov#traffic