"The findings of a test well drilled in Alaska three decades ago have been a closely guarded secret. We found answers in a Cleveland courthouse."
"ANCHORAGE — Working through two winters in the biting arctic cold, roustabouts bored three miles deep into the coastal plain of northeast Alaska in search of oil. In the spring of 1986, they packed up and left, uttering not a word about what they had found and leaving only a short section of steel pipe to mark the spot.
For more than three decades, the findings from the $40 million exploratory well have been one of the oil industry’s most closely guarded secrets. Outside of the oil giants that paid for it, only a handful of people know what was discovered there.
Now the secret has become much more than a curiosity: The Trump administration, undoing decades of environmental protections, plans to sell drilling leases in the area, which is part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and has long been believed to contain North America’s biggest untapped onshore trove of oil."
Steve Eder and Henry Fountain report for the New York Times April 2, 2019.
Advertisement 
