Press release - 9 January, 2002
Dillon oil rig. Cook inlet, Alaska
Following years of campaigning by Greenpeace and other
environmental groups, BP announced Monday it is dropping plans for
the controversial Liberty oil field in Alaska.
BP proposed to develop the Liberty oil field in the Alaskan
Beaufort Sea 40 miles to the east of where the controversial
Norsthstar oil field was developed. Like Northstar, Liberty would
have involved an artifical drilling island located six miles off
Alaska's north coast with a subsea pipeline carrying oil ashore to
the Trans Alaska Pipeline for shipment to Valdez and eventual
tankering to the Lower 48 and Asia.
"BP's action today confirms what the American public has been
saying all along: We do not support drilling for oil. We need to
focus new energy developments on renewables like solar and wind,"
said Melanie Duchin, a Greenpeace campaigner in Anchorage, Alaska.
"Plans by the Bush administration and some in Congress to open the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will meet a similar fate."
Greenpeace has opposed this new oil frontier development in the
Beaufort Sea on the basis that it will exacerbate global warming
and delay the transition to renewable forms of energy such as solar
and wind.