Just a pipe dream\ The oil under Gull Island, A

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The oil under Gull Island, Alaska, appears to be just a pipe dream

Joyce Pines | Kalamazoo Gazette Gazette

on August 07, 2008 at 5:00 PM, updated September 05, 2008 at 2:12 PM


"Oil: We're running out or unable to access it," a reader wrote in an e-mail to the Kalamazoo Gazette recently. Then he added, "Google Gull Island."

Another reader has written a few times in the last year about Gull Island. "The biggest pool of oil in North America, possibly the world, was discovered in 1976, on Gull Island, Alaska," he writes in his latest e-mail.

Gull Island oil is supposed to be the answer to America's current crisis with enough crude to meet America's needs for 200 years.

Great, so how come the only person who knows about this is a former Baptist missionary named Lindsey Williams, who ministered to the folks building the Alaskan pipeline in the 1970s -- and the folks who have bought his story and are spreading it all over the Internet?

I decided to try to untangle this mystery by following the reader's suggestion. With the help of Gazette intern Carrie Webber, we googled Gull Island oil. There were 106,000 hits and almost all of them trace back to Williams. He appears to be the single source for this amazing story.

According to a 2006 posting on AmericanFreePress.net, which calls itself "America's last real newspaper," Williams says he was told, in 1977, by an Atlantic Richfield executive, "We have just drilled into the largest pool of oil in North America--(and) in the world!" Williams was also told not to tell anybody.

In Williams book, "The Energy Non-Crisis," which is available for free online, he writes about standing with the executive on the shore of the Arctic Ocean and seeing the new well come in. He claims they watched a big black column of smoke rise up, like a bomb exploding. Watching the smoke, Williams writes the oil official grew more and more excited because he could tell how big the find was by the volume of smoke and fire they could see. Then, Williams says, they went back to an office where several officials excitedly talked about a bunch of data, all too technical for Williams to understand.

What Williams does remember is the official saying that this field would allow for a second pipeline and Alaska would be able to pump 2 million barrels of oil a day from this new find.

Then, he claims, the next day, the official told him the government had ordered the company to cap the well, claiming it was in an area where they weren't allowed to drill and because there were environmental concerns.

I tried to look up Gull Island, Alaska, on a map. The only Gull Island I could find was in the middle of a river in the middle of the state, 139 miles north of Fairbanks.

Another problem with the book is there's no science to back up anything Williams says, not one official source. His only real statistic is the claim of this unnamed official that the burn they were watching indicated an oil field that could deliver 2 million barrels of oil a day.

I e-mailed a chemistry professor at Western Michigan University and asked if he'd ever heard of Gull Island. He said he hadn't and suggested I contact Kurt Cobb, a writer on energy and the environment. Cobb, who lives in Kalamazoo, is a columnist for a Paris-based science news site, Scitizen. His work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal online and he has a blog, Resource Insights.

Cobb also was not familiar with Gull Island, but he was able to provide some context on the possibility of an oil field that could deliver 2 million barrels a day. Cobb writes, "the claim that 2 million barrels per day could come from Gull Island means it would be classed among the world's so-called super giant fields of which there are only a few, most of them in Saudi Arabia. It would be puzzling why the owners of this presumed find would not be pumping as fast as they can at this price."

But 2 million barrels a day would not solve our energy problems, Cobb said. To begin with, the United States uses about 20 million barrels a day. The entire world uses 85 million barrels a day.

Even if this field existed, there's no guarantee the United States would get the oil. The company that Williams talked about, Atlantic-Richfield is now part of British Petroleum. In addition, oil is a worldwide market. The company would sell it to the highest bidder, which on the West Coast is usually Japan, said Cobb.

I realize that people will believe what they choose, but I can't find anything that suggests Gull Island is a credible story

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