Deep below the ocean floor outside Anchorage this spring, a huge drill bit chewed through multi-million-year-old sandstone, sending crushed bits of rock back to the surface through a mile-long hole.
The hunt for natural gas, to keep Alaska warm, had resumed.
Here, on crowded platforms perched above the icy waters of Cook Inlet, a small army labors to keep up the extraction of fossil fuels from Alaska’s oldest producing oil and gas basin. After a half-century of extraction, the gas is still there. But it’s gotten harder and costlier to produce — and fewer companies are participating in the search…