accommodate whatever adjustments are necessary, for example by a change

in the value of the floating Canadian dollar.

་

Bearing this in mind, I offer some rough estimates of first round outflows under different assumptions regarding financing. The Impact Statement estimates that shipment by a Canadian route would cost approximately $1.20 per barrel. If the line is built entirely with Canadian capital, the first round outflow would be $876 million per year. If the line were built with 50% U.S. capital, the direct outflow would be $438 million per year. Furthermore, to put these figures in perspective the

total dollar outflow for imports of goods and services is likely to be over $100 billion per year by 1980, and may be over $150 billion per year by. 1985. Thus the net dollar outflow attributable to building the

Canadian route rather than TAPS will be a small fraction of 1% of the

total volume of U.S. expenditures abroad. It should not be a major factor in the choice of routes.

It is mis

As an aside, I would like to comment on Secretary Morton's statement that foreign oil cost the U.S. balance of payments $6 billion in first round outflows in 1972 and are likely to cost $16 billion by 1980. (See his letter to all Senators dated April 4, 1973). This statement is at best misleading and irrelevant, and at worst irresponsible. leading because by referring only to total oil imports it sheds no light on the questions of TAPS vs. the Canadian route. In fact it diverts attention from the real issue. It is irresponsible because it is apparently based on an inappropriate concept of dollar outflow which biases the estimate upward substantially. On the basis of incomplete information, I estimate the true first round foreign expenditure for 1972 to be between $4.5-5 billion.

CONCLUSION

Congress faces an important decision reflecting conflicts between environmental and economic values and between narrow

short run private and broad long run public interests. Congress has an historic opportunity to utilize the best available scientific, technical, and economic information in making this decision. Much important work has already been done in compiling, organizing,

and analyzing this information.

and serious uncertainties.

But there are still major gaps

On both environmental and economic grounds, the scales are already tipped toward the Canadian route. Despite this the Department of Interior persists in advocating TAPS, in distorting and misrepresenting the results of its own analysis, and in refusing to enter into good faith discussions with the Canadian government. It would be desirable, particularly in the face of this rigidity on the part of Interior, and what must be a massive private lobbying effort on behalf of the oil industry, to obtain more information, the bulk of which already appears to have been amassed by Canadian sources, on the economic and environmental aspects of the joint oil-gas corridor in Canada. There should also be serious discussions with the Canadian government concerning environmental conditions, financing arrangements, and their own likely needs for oil delivery capacity during the next 10-12 years.

I therefore urge Congress to direct an independent, objective,

and thorough analysis and evaluation of the Canadian common

corridor alternative.

STATEMENT OF DR. ROBERT CURRY, ENVIRONMENTAL
GEOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA

Mr. CURRY. I am Robert Curry, and I will conclude this panel presentation. I am an associate professor of Environmental Geology at the University of Montana. I hold advanced degrees in plant ecology and geology with a Ph. D. in geology and geophysics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Beginning in February 1969, I have been deeply involved with the scientific analysis of problems associated with Arctic Alaskan petroleum development. In the early spring of 1969, while employed as a professor at the University of California, I was engaged by the Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, to conduct a reconnaissance survey of the then pending Alaska pipeline proposal and to help to formulate policy guidelines that might be used by the Department of the Interior to assure minimization of environmental impacts for the Alaskan petroleum development.

I was then serving as a scientific adviser to the U.S. Senate Public Works Committee on matters of environmental effects of offshore petroleum development prompted by the Santa Barbara oil spill and was advising the President's science advisory staff on the same

matter.

Since I held a research hydrologist position with the Geological Survey and was employed part time by them and since I have lived in Alaska and studied arctic landscape processes there while employed by the University of Alaska, I was asked to begin work for Interior in April of 1969 on route selection criteria for determining environmental impact of the various petroleum transshipment and roadway schemes then being proposed and effected by petroleum companies and the pipeline consortium. This work included overflight and ground visits to the Hickle-Highway and the surveyed trans-Alaska pipeline route, and preparation of an advisory report.

Following presentation of my findings and conclusions to Interior, I began a long and intense involvement with other scientists to bring the issues into the public realm. This contributed to the preliminary injunction and long litigation in Wilderness Society v. Morton, Civil

No. 928-70.

I have served in an advisory capacity in this litigation since the granting of the injunction and have prepared and digested many thousands of pages of documents on those aspects of the arctic pipelines within the areas of my expertise, namely arctic geomorphology, hydrology, and plant ecology.

I have published professional papers in these fields, specializing particularly in those geologic processes that constitute hazards to human beings and their works such as river flooding, seismic hazards, permafrost considerations, slope stability, and similar natural events.

Since 1961 I have visited and conducted field work on approximately 95 percent of the proposed trans-Alaska pipeline route from Prudhoe to Valdez and have investigated representative portions of both the Alaskan and Canadian portions of several alternative Mackenzie Valley pipeline routes as far south as Edmonton, Alberta.

I have also traveled extensively within Canada and had frequent discussions and assistance from Canadians to help me evaluate the basic data for their routes.

At this time I wish to attempt to summarize an extremely large volume of factual information on the comparative terrestrial environmental impacts of the Alaskan and Canadian pipeline alternatives. These geologic and hydrologic data overwhelmingly favor Mackenzie Valley routes.

These geologic and hydrologic data overwhelmingly favor Mackenzie Valley routes. Primary factors under consideration are seismic risk through pipeline failure associated with local ground accelerations and offsets, sea waves, slope failures, and glacier accelerations; flood and scour hazard associated with buried river crossings and glacier outburst flood ways; foundation failure hazard associated with high ground-ice permafrost melting, and service and haul road substrate destruction causing increased siltation in waterways and loss of permafrost and vegetative covers.

Some serious misinformation is still being used as the basis for comments and decisions regarding the environmental impacts of the two major pipeline routes.

Although it is true that the trans-Canada route is longer, it is not at all true that there is more unstable permafrost, more chances of slope failure, equal seismic risk, or equal hydrologic risk.

Morton's letter to Congressmen of April 4 also illustrates some misconceptions about the hazard geology of the two routes, such as his ideas about design for earthquakes, permafrost, and river crossings that cause me to seriously doubt that he has the ability to grasp these technical matters sufficiently to assure his capability to attach adequate environmental and technical stipulations to any Arctic pipeline permit, no matter where constructed.

Those factual and implied errors are so overwhelmingly incorrect that they must be thoroughly challenged in open scientific forum. The following analysis will cover some of the major points of terrestrial impact.

It is well-known that the Canadian alternatives offer less seismic risk than the Alaskan route but the degree of this difference is not fully appreciated. First, the magnitude of expected earthquakes was seriously underestimated in the environmental impact statement for the longest midsection of the Alaska pipeline route, 67° north to Donnelly Dome, because earthquake of several times larger magnitudes have occurred within 30 miles of the proposed pipeline within recent historical times. The very high risk seismic zone comprises over twothirds of the Alaskan route while the lesser, 6, highest risk zone for the Canadian route is less than 120 miles in length.

About 450 to 500 miles of the Alaskan route are through areas with a conservatively determined risk of 8 to 8.5 while but one-fourth that distance in Canada has but one-thirtieth or less expected ground movement.

If we multiply length by risk factor, the longer Canadian line has but one one-hundred-twentieth the risk from ground acceleration that the Alaskan pipeline has. But ground acceleration is not the most dangerous seismic risk.

Secretary Morton assures the Congressmen that "The environmental and technical stipulations that I will attach to the Alaska pipeline permit will assure that this pipeline is designed to withstand the largest earthquake that has ever been experienced in Alaska."

You heard Governor Egan that that was indeed the largest earthquake that we had experienced in the continental United States. I presume Secretary Morton means that the pipe will be designed to withstand ground accelerations of on the order of 1 g, or twice that of gravity.

Although it is very doubtful that this can be done for all modes of operation of a pipeline under all temperatures throughout its lifetime, even if it could be done, it would not accommodate the much larger fault offsets expectable in Alaska. Periodic fault offsets of on the order of 3 feet are not all unexpectable along each of the many traces of the Denali fault system that the pipeline must cross in Alaska.

This fault is apparently a major circum-Pacific fault bounding two plates of the earth's crust. Such faults have many traces and many fault blocks are caught between large moving masses during earthquakes. This causes local displacements much greater than the regional displacements, as was observed in Alaska in 1964 when local movement of as much as 45 feet was observed.

Much of this local displacement is vertical since the smaller blocks are wedged upward between the two blocks of the earth's crust.

Canada does not have this sort of faulting along any of the pipeline route. Nowhere have the pipeline companies or Department of the Interior demonstrated an ability to design pipelines operating at full capacity capable of withstanding 10 to 45 foot offsets that are entirely probable along the Alaskan route.

Since the highest seismic area in Alaska coincides with the area of greatest tectonic, mountain-building, activity, the highest mountains and steepest slopes are found over the foci of the largest earthquakes. Thus, the highest ground accelerations are expected in the mountains near the sea, leading to much greater landslide and seismic sea wave hazard for the Alaskan route. Recent work by the U.S. Geological Survey and others, Boore, D. M., 1972, Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, page 454, has shown that previous estimates of ground accelerations to be expected near large-magnitude earthquakes were too low by factors of 5 to 10. This means that landslides, particularly landslides into the sea with associated giant sea waves up to hundreds of feet high as observed in southern Alaska, are virtually certain in the pipeline vicinity within its lifetime and many parts of the pipeline and associated structures would be very much more vulnerable to these hazards in southern Alaska than Canada.

The Alaskan route differs completely from the Canadian in its close association with active coastal-zone glaciers. These glaciers are subject to surges that may or may not be triggered by seismic activity. Some of the glaciers in the vicinity of the Alaskan pipeline are known to have surged in historic time and the route passes within the area over which the glaciers traverse.

Seismic sea waves, generated by submarine ground displacements such as that associated with the 1964 Alaskan earthquake, are a particular hazard to shore installations such as that at Valdez, the terminus of the pipeline.