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"  Two days after Christmas, a pair of vessels labored through heavy seas in the Gulf of Alaska. In the lead was the Aiviq, a $200 million tow ship with four 5444-hp engines. A thick line connected that ship to the Kulluk, a floating oil rig that wallowed behind. Owned by Royal Dutch Shell, the rig measured 266 feet across and was shaped like a squat, nearly round funnel. After spending part of the fall in the Arctic Ocean, it was being towed to the Seattle area for upgrades when a winter storm hit. A buckle on the towline broke, severing the connection between the two vessels. Then, as the Aiviq worked to restore the line, its engines failed, leaving both vessels adrift in 30-mph winds and 25-foot seas. The Aiviq got its engines working again, but crews from a nearby Coast Guard base and private tug companies struggled for days to regain control of the rig, which was drifting rapidly toward the islands of the Kodiak archipelago. The storm worsened and the deck pitched violently as Coast Guard helicopters hoisted the 18 men onboard to safety. The Kulluk was headed for the rocks. On New Year&amp;#039;s Day 2013, the world awoke to images of Shell&amp;#039;s prize oil rig being pounded against the shore by 40-foot waves. I had been on the Kulluk two months earlier. It was late October, and the rig was anchored in the Beaufort Sea, off the north coast of Alaska. Crews from Shell and its contractors had been preparing an exploratory well, and now they were racing to finish their work before pack ice encroached. The company planned to return in the summer of 2013 to complete several wells and, perhaps, ignite an offshore oil boom in the Arctic. I had seen the Kulluk before; now I became the only reporter to visit the rig on-site. Many Alaskans, activists, and energy experts had spent years following Shell&amp;#039;s efforts to probe the large petroleum reserves that may extend off America&amp;#039;s Arctic coast. The plan was both bold and controversial. But it was only after the Kulluk accident that the risks and potential rewards of drilling in that remote and dangerous environment became a topic of national debate. We have entered an age of hard-to-get oil, when energy companies can no longer scratch beneath the desert or warm-water shallows and expect the petroleum to flow out on its own. Now they drill into the seafloor beneath thousands of feet of water to find oil. They invest huge quantities of energy to frack shale from Pennsylvania to North Dakota and to squeeze petroleum from the tar sands of Canada. And, increasingly, oil companies are turning to the Arctic. A widely publicized report released by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2008 estimates that the region above the Arctic Circle holds 90 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 1.669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. More than 25 billion barrels of recoverable crude could lie beneath Alaska&amp;#039;s Arctic waters alone. That&amp;#039;s as much crude as Alaska&amp;#039;s giant Prudhoe Bay oilfields held when production started in the 1970s. These offshore reserves could someday help the United States do something that politicians have long called for, stridently but without offering much detail: Achieve energy independence. In 2012 domestic production reached a 20-year high, and the International Energy Agency predicted that the country may produce more fossil fuel than it uses by 2035. (See &amp;quot;The Truth About Energy Independence,&amp;quot; page 4.) There is a problem, however\u2014developing new oil and gas fields requires us to face new environmental dangers. On my way north to visit the Kulluk, I stopped off at the Shell offices in Anchorage and spoke with Jim Miller, the company&amp;#039;s Alaska drilling superintendent. He said that the shallow wells the company planned to sink in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas would be technically simple, much like those drilled in the Gulf of Mexico in the 1970s. The only real hurdles, Miller said, were logistical. Such statements may be true, but they have never been reassuring to opponents of Shell&amp;#039;s plans. Critics always cited the Arctic&amp;#039;s harsh climate\u2014with its months of darkness, pack ice, and subzero temperatures\u2014as their primary concern. Further, the Coast Guard lacks deep-water ports and aircraft hangars on the North Slope to respond to accidents, and few of its vessels can operate in heavy ice. In a way, Shell got lucky with the Kulluk incident: The rig ran into trouble just 50 miles from Base Kodiak, Alaska&amp;#039;s biggest Coast Guard facility, which bristles with ships, C-130H airplanes, helicopters, and personnel. The Arctic Ocean is about 900 miles north of Kodiak by air and roughly 1700 miles by sea. It freezes every fall. If the Kulluk had grounded on the North Slope, Shell would have been left largely on its own to mount a response.  Even routine tasks can be difficult to complete in the Arctic. When I arrived on the North Slope last October, the weather was typical for the region\u2014low clouds and ice fog, wind, snow flurries. Yet Shell&amp;#039;s two supply helicopters were grounded. They belonged to PHI, a Gulf of Mexico contractor, and lacked de-icing capabilities, curtailing the weather windows when they could fly. A couple dozen contractors bound for the Kulluk and its support vessels were stranded in Deadhorse, a settlement of prefab dorms on the edge of the Prudhoe Bay oilfields, where the trans-Alaska pipeline begins. Additional workers were waiting in Barrow, the biggest I\u00F1upiaq Eskimo town on the North Slope. Still more men were stuck at sea. I had been in Deadhorse for three days before the weather cleared enough for us to fly. A half-dozen contractors and I scrambled onto a Sikorsky S-92 helicopter outside Shell&amp;#039;s small terminal. Inside, the industrial roar was too loud to shout over. We wore bulky Mustang survival suits and buckled ourselves into four-point harnesses. The helicopter flew north across the tundra to the shoreline; below I saw a succession of icy inlets and, finally, open water. Fifty minutes after we&amp;#039;d departed, the Kulluk came into view. It looked like a small island, glowing blue and white against the dark sea, with a red derrick jutting up from the deck. GRAPHIC: Anatomy of an Offshore Oil Rig Inside, I stripped off my survival suit and wound through the narrow halls to find Eric Whatley, one of Shell&amp;#039;s senior drilling supervisors. Whatley, 38, has a shaved head and a central Louisiana accent as smooth as warm honey. He was sitting in a cramped office, staring into a monitor that showed the position of the nearly 20 vessels Shell had deployed to the Arctic. Because of the region&amp;#039;s isolation, the company had been required to assemble a fleet of support vessels, as though it were mounting a distant military campaign. The Kulluk was stationed on Shell&amp;#039;s Sivulliq-N prospect in the Beaufort Sea, at coordinates 70\u00BA23&amp;#039;30&amp;quot; N, 145\u00BA58&amp;#039;53&amp;quot; W. The Noble Discoverer drill ship, Shell&amp;#039;s second rig, sat 340 miles to the west, in the Chukchi. Tugs and buoy handlers, supply boats, and spill-response vessels were roughly divided between the two seas. Whatley changed from sandals into steel-toed boots, found me a hard hat, and took me on a tour. The Kulluk was built in 1983 in Japan to drill in the Canadian Arctic. At that time, oil companies, including Shell, were exploring offshore on both sides of the U.S. border. Then, in the mid-1990s, drilling ground to a halt. Oil prices had dropped by half since the 1980s, and companies shifted their focus to the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The Kulluk sat neglected for 14 years in Canada&amp;#039;s McKinley Bay, frozen in pack ice during the winters, colonized by eider ducks and glaucous gulls each summer. On the drilling floor Whatley showed me new digital sensors and monitors\u2014Shell had spent $292 million refurbishing the rig. But much of the original equipment was still in place, including the clutch and brake for the overdrive motor, which can turn the drill string with 25,000 foot-pounds of torque. &amp;quot;This was like finding a perfect &amp;#039;69 Camaro in a barn,&amp;quot; Whatley said. &amp;quot;Everything is manual, and it works under extreme conditions. It&amp;#039;s easy to fix too\u2014stuff on newer rigs, you have to call NASA out, it&amp;#039;s so complicated.&amp;quot; The Kulluk was one of the first pieces of equipment Shell bought when it decided to return to the north. The company planned to start drilling as early as 2007. However, it was delayed first by lawsuits and then by regula tory scrutiny after the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which released 4.9 million barrels of crude into the sea. By the spring of 2012, Shell was confident it was ready to sink its first new offshore wells in the Arctic. Then, in the months before the Kulluk&amp;#039;s grounding, the company began stumbling through a series of missteps that raised doubts about its planning. Exhaust from the Discoverer was found to exceed permitted emissions levels, and the ship nearly ran aground in Dutch Harbor. The Arctic Challenger, a barge meant to carry an oil-spill containment dome, failed Coast Guard inspections. Then, with the season running down, the massive dome itself, which had cost $400 million to design and construct, buckled during testing in Washington&amp;#039;s Puget Sound. The dome was listed in the company&amp;#039;s Oil Spill Response Plans, and without it regulators wouldn&amp;#039;t allow Shell to bore into petroleum-bearing layers of rock. In the end the company was allowed to drill to more than 1000 feet, doing so-called top-hole work in preparation for 2013. Drilling went smoothly, but then the troubles resumed. The Coast Guard found pollution and safety problems on the Discoverer. The Kulluk ran aground. And the Environmental Protection Agency said that the company had repeat edly violated its air-quality permits. Any one of Shell&amp;#039;s 2012 mishaps would have been notable. Together they seemed to counter Shell&amp;#039;s repeated assertions since 2007 that it was prepared for Arctic Ocean exploration. After the Kulluk accident, the company pointed out that none of its setbacks involved drilling operations\u2014in particular, it characterized the Kulluk grounding as a marine transport issue similar to those that have affected freighters and fishing vessels in the Gulf of Alaska in the past. &amp;quot;It is possible to drill safely in the Arctic, as our long history and 2012 season show,&amp;quot; said Curtis Smith, a spokesman for the company. &amp;quot;But we also understand our responsibility here. When operations don&amp;#039;t go as planned, you have to learn from that. And we will.&amp;quot; In January the Coast Guard, the Department of the Interior, and members of Congress all announced fresh reviews of the company&amp;#039;s drilling program, a level of scrutiny that the company said it welcomed. Shell executives had once hoped that a smooth inaugural season would win over its critics. Instead, in early 2013 it found itself fighting to salvage its reputation.  Many native residents of the north Slope and the northwestern coast of Alaska have opposed offshore drilling for decades. Johnny Aiken, who leads the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, says concerns spiked after the BP spill. &amp;quot;The oil companies, not just BP, proved that there is no technology to really clean up an oil spill in the ocean,&amp;quot; Aiken told me. &amp;quot;That is even more true up here in the Arctic. I don&amp;#039;t see how the federal agencies are allowing this to go on.&amp;quot; According to Craig George, a biologist who has studied bowhead whales on the North Slope for more than 30 years, the worst scenario might be an oil spill beneath the ice. Bowheads have huge mouths that accommodate 640 baleen plates, flexible filters than can grow up to 14 feet long. The whales swim with their mouths open, filtering huge quantities of water to feed on zooplankton. In the spring the whales and other marine mammals follow the leads, or channels of open water, as they appear in the ice. If a spill occurred nearby, that&amp;#039;s where oil might concentrate. I\u00F1upiaq communities fear that such an event would be a catastrophe for the animals\u2014and for themselves. Qaiyaan Opie Su&amp;#039;esu&amp;#039;e had offered to show me around Barrow. She is a tall, powerfully built 32-year-old who runs a program called Tagium Inungi, or, roughly, the People of the Ocean, to keep people informed about offshore oil drilling, climate change, and shipping, which are all affecting the North Slope. &amp;quot;The leaders of the 1970s were in their 20s and 30s and fought for us with very little education,&amp;quot; she told me. In those days, the I\u00F1upiat secured land rights, resisted attacks on subsistence hunting, and won a measure of control over the land-based oil industry. Now some members of her generation were moving back from Anchorage, where they had gone to attend college or find jobs. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s our turn to protect what we have,&amp;quot; she said. One afternoon, Su&amp;#039;esu&amp;#039;e drove me through town to meet her uncle, a harpooner with the unlikely name of Jonah Uqsi Leavitt. There are about 40 whaling crews in Barrow, many of them based on family affiliations. Su&amp;#039;esu&amp;#039;e and her uncle both belong to the Luther Leavitt crew; they trace their ancestry in part to George Leavitt, a whaler from New Bedford, Mass., who lived here in the early 1900s. A few steps from Jonah&amp;#039;s three-room house, the crew&amp;#039;s boat rested on sawhorses above the snow. It was 21 feet long and made of sealskin stretched over a wooden frame. During the spring hunt, sealskin boats are silently paddled away from camps on the ice. In addition to oil spills, the I\u00F1upiat worry about underwater noise. Seismic tests by offshore companies have diverted whales from their migration routes in the past, making the hunt more dangerous and uncertain. Leavitt next showed me the roughly cut entrance to a permafrost ice cellar. Tons of whale meat were stored inside. The I\u00F1upiat believe they have a spiritual relationship with the bowheads, but whaling isn&amp;#039;t only a cultural rite. It provides a daily staple of their diet. Leavitt was hesitant to comment on the drilling, but even tually expressed concern. &amp;quot;In my mind, we can&amp;#039;t stop it,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;But I hope they don&amp;#039;t leave a mess in our ocean. That&amp;#039;s our food, just like cattle. We have to take care of our ocean.&amp;quot; There are I\u00F1upiat who support offshore oil exploration. But a far greater number prefer to expand oil development on land instead. The North Slope Borough is a county- level government with a vast territory, whose residents are primarily I\u00F1upiat. The borough collects most of its revenue\u2014hundreds of millions of dollars\u2014from property taxes levied on the companies at Prudhoe Bay. However, North Slope oil production has dropped by two-thirds since its peak in the 1980s, and, like other Alaskans, the I\u00F1upiat don&amp;#039;t want their tax base to shrink. Johnny Aiken is one of many North Slope residents who support development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), a preserve that has become a line in the sand for wilderness advocates. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know why the federal government or the people of the United States don&amp;#039;t want to develop the ANWR area,&amp;quot; Aiken said. &amp;quot;The way that industry handles development onshore is a lot safer than offshore. It&amp;#039;s very frustrating.&amp;quot;  Snow was falling hard by my third day on the Kulluk. The rig rode up ocean swells and then slammed loudly into the troughs. The cloud ceiling had dropped and the helicopters weren&amp;#039;t flying. Dan Tesar was the logistics coordinator: He had 83 men onboard, and most needed to return to Deadhorse before the fleet could head south. During the stretches of clear weather, he got on the phone and urged the dispatcher to impart some North Slope wisdom to Gulf Coast pilots. &amp;quot;Do I need to remind them guys that these flurries are not going away until May?&amp;quot; he asked in a voice roughened by Backwoods Honey Berry cigars. Tesar offered to have a cattle prod, or maybe some napalm, flown in to get the pilots out of the hangar. He chuckled darkly when the call ended. &amp;quot;They are not flying,&amp;quot; he told Whatley. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve got perfectly good weather in both places, but they are not going to fly.&amp;quot; GRAPHIC: Anatomy of an Offshore Oil Rig Once or twice a day, senior staff gathered for static-filled conference calls with the other ships and Shell&amp;#039;s office in Anchorage. The Chukchi vessels would soon be leaving the theater, but the Kulluk fleet was bogged down. The Aiviq needed to refuel from a tanker before towing the rig southward, but crews were required by environmental rules to deploy a containment boom first. The seas had been too rough for that. Now a storm was blowing in from the west. It promised to be mild by Arctic standards, but even that could mean a week before anyone flew to shore. By then the pack ice might be closing in. Whatley called an all-rig meeting in the galley to explain a gathering crisis. He needed the crew&amp;#039;s help to reduce water usage. Ships at sea routinely pump treated, nonhazardous wastewater overboard, but the Kulluk&amp;#039;s permit required zero discharge\u2014the crew wasn&amp;#039;t even sweeping snow off the helideck. The rig only had the capacity to store five days of wastewater before pumping it onto another vessel. Now the churning sea was causing delays. If necessary, the crew could buy time by emptying the Kulluk&amp;#039;s 4200-barrel wastewater tank into a 6500-barrel ballast tank, but it wasn&amp;#039;t something Whatley wanted to do. &amp;quot;I know this sounds crazy,&amp;quot; he told the crew, &amp;quot;but if you got to piss, piss maybe twice before you flush. As far as your towels, if you want to use a new towel every day, that&amp;#039;s your privilege. Personally, me, I&amp;#039;m using mine two or three days.&amp;quot; Whatley had been saying all along that the crew wasn&amp;#039;t there to drill\u2014they were trying to earn the right to drill. They could always release the treated wastewater into the sea, but that might violate the permit. &amp;quot;If we do that, none of us are coming back next year,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s one of the reasons we were hand-picked, for situations just like this\u2014situations no one&amp;#039;s heard of.&amp;quot; Whatley, who impressed me as a gifted leader, later reported that water usage dropped by 75 percent after the meeting. At the time, all I knew was that another crisis was brewing. A roustabout asked if I had smokes to sell\u2014they were running low onboard. Kevin Colclasure talks with intensity and walks quickly\u2014it was hard to keep up as he strode along the Kulluk&amp;#039;s catwalks, showing off the rig&amp;#039;s new engines and emissions- control equipment. He is the rig&amp;#039;s maintenance supervisor and a native of the global oil circuit, where men speak with Louisiana accents and fill their passports with stamps from places like Cam eroon, Oman, and Mexico. In Nigeria, Colclasure recalled, he saw rusted-out oil platforms with leaking valves. The rigs were barricaded by razor wire and gunboats to keep the pirates off. When he arrived on the Kulluk in 2010, he found the best-maintained rig he&amp;#039;d ever seen. At first, though, it was like exploring an alien spacecraft. He puzzled over a massive plumbing system that seemed to have no purpose at all, until he discovered it carried ethylene glycol through the walls to keep the rig from freezing. Equatorial know-how fell short in small ways too. When workers painted the decks, they didn&amp;#039;t use grit paint, failing to anticipate that the surfaces would become slippery with ice. They had planned to fix that but ran out of time before leaving the shipyard. What Colclasure found most striking, though, were the project&amp;#039;s priorities\u2014operations would stop completely to avoid disturbing a seabird. He hoped that Shell&amp;#039;s operation would become the benchmark for offshore drilling in the Arctic and elsewhere. He&amp;#039;s not alone in that. Shortly after the 2010 BP disaster, I met an oil-spill response supervisor who worked for a Shell contractor. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re not going to BP it up here,&amp;quot; he promised. Despite its string of errors in 2012, Royal Dutch Shell can point to substantial efforts to prepare for Arctic drilling. It held hundreds of meetings with Arctic residents to exchange information. Under steady pressure, the company stationed oil-spill response vessels near each drill site. It agreed to stop drilling during the I\u00F1upiat&amp;#039;s fall bowhead hunt. It invested in ice-class vessels, and it funded scientific research that may lead to additional requirements. In hindsight it appears that Shell underestimated the difficulty of many tasks\u2014a primary example being the job of towing the Kulluk south at the end of the season. Shell&amp;#039;s skeptics include Marilyn Heiman, the director of the Pew Environment Group&amp;#039;s U.S. Arctic Program, who has worked on oil-spill issues in Alaska since the Exxon Valdez spill. &amp;quot;Shell may be ready to drill, but they&amp;#039;re clearly not ready for Alaska conditions,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Hurricane- force storms aren&amp;#039;t uncommon up here. These are things that need to be evaluated as regulators make decisions.&amp;quot; Federal agencies could do more, as well. The Coast Guard could accelerate plans to build facilities on the North Slope. Regulators could limit lease sales to the best-studied and safest locations. And the industry could be required to fund a citizen advisory organization like the highly regarded group formed in Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez spill. All of those measures have been suggested. But while there are technical solutions for making drilling safer, no formula can determine whether it&amp;#039;s safe enough. Donnie Wilson, the CEO of Elastec/American Marine, has helped innovate some of the world&amp;#039;s best oil-spill response technology. &amp;quot;Everyone wants zero pollution,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;but it&amp;#039;s just not going to happen. In a world of energy-hungry individuals, there will be environmental trade offs.&amp;quot; The important questions are for politicians, not engineers, to answer: How much do we want oil jobs and tax receipts; how much risk will we accept to get them; and who will bear the brunt of those hazards? We can drill in the Arctic and accept the risk of environmental damage while working to minimize it, or we can find our energy elsewhere. That&amp;#039;s the choice. Around 11:00 on my last night aboard the Kulluk, I found Whatley at his desk. He had been working for 18 hours and his eyes were puffy beneath the bill of a ragged Shell cap. Whatley worries that people misunderstand men like him. He went to the oilfields when he was 19, and, since then, he&amp;#039;s paid the bills with every job a driller can do\u2014roustabout, roughneck, derrickman, and more. But Whatley&amp;#039;s not blind to the dangers of oil development. There are small wells near his home in Louisiana; if those drillers messed up, it might affect his own children&amp;#039;s health. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got the same concerns as the I\u00F1upiat do,&amp;quot; he said. Around noon the next day, the S-92 showed up and carried nearly a dozen men off the rig, including me and Eric Whatley. By early January, Whatley was back in Alaska to work on the Kulluk salvage operation. It wasn&amp;#039;t clear when Shell would return to the Arctic Ocean. The Kulluk and the Discoverer are desig nated as backup rigs for each other, in case a relief well needs to be drilled after a blowout. If the Kulluk can&amp;#039;t go north in 2013, Shell&amp;#039;s season probably will be canceled. In addition, regulatory reviews mean that the necessary permits may not be in place to allow Shell to drill. Looking further out, ConocoPhillips, Statoil, and others have been hoping to explore for oil in the American Arctic. And the Interior Department recently called for more lease sales. Those plans all seem less certain now. However, some Arctic marine operations continue no matter what. In Barrow the whaling season is approaching, and the sealskins on the Luther Leavitt crew&amp;#039;s whaling boat need to be replaced with five new ones. That will happen this spring. Then, when the bowheads return from the west, the crew will travel to the edge of the ice and go out onto the sea. They&amp;#039;ve been hunting whales for a long time and there should be little fuss. The boat will float alone in the dark sea, beyond the margin of the continent. And if conditions are good and a whale offers itself, Jonah Leavitt will get a strike.  Dec. 21, 2012 The 360-foot, $200 million tow vessel Aiviq leaves Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, towing the conical, 266-foot-diameter Kulluk\u2014&amp;quot;a dog of a tow,&amp;quot; in the words of one veteran tug captain.  Dec. 27  Near Alaska&amp;#039;s Kodiak Island a towline buckle fails, setting the Kulluk adrift in 20-foot seas and 40-mph winds. &amp;quot;In the winter it&amp;#039;s basically one storm coming across the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska after another,&amp;quot; says Kevin Riddle, commander of the 282-foot Coast Guard cutter Alex Haley, which was 10 hours away when called to assist the Aiviq. Dec. 28, 12:30 am  The tow ship and rig are 50 miles from U.S. Coast Guard Base Kodiak when the Aiviq&amp;#039;s four 5444-hp engines sputter; Shell blames contaminated fuel. &amp;quot;After we got on scene,&amp;quot; Riddle says, &amp;quot;they told us they were having engine problems. In 30 to 60 minutes they had lost all engines.&amp;quot; Dec. 28, 6:30 am  The Aiviq and Kulluk are adrift in 30-mph winds and 25-foot seas as crew on the Alex Haley attempt to pass a towline to the Kulluk. The process involves using a special rifle to shoot a thin leader line from ship to rig; a thicker &amp;quot;messenger&amp;quot; line attached to the leader conveys the towline, a 1200-foot-long double-braided nylon line with an 8-inch circumference. But the Kulluk and Aiviq are drifting faster than the Alex Haley. &amp;quot;The more surface area above the water, the more affected by the wind a vessel is,&amp;quot; Riddle says. &amp;quot;The Kulluk has a high freeboard and a high rig in the center that gets caught in the wind like a big sail.&amp;quot; The messenger line breaks as the tug&amp;#039;s crew tries to winch it in, and the towline snarls in an Alex Haley propeller. The ship heads to Kodiak for repairs.  Dec. 29, 4 pm  Aiviq crew restore partial engine power and, using auxiliary lines, regain limited control over the Kulluk. But the 18 men on the rig must be evacuated by helicopter in wind gusts of about 50 mph, with the aircraft operating right next to the rig&amp;#039;s 160-foot-tall derrick. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s no way to stay above the superstructure; it&amp;#039;s swinging toward you the whole time,&amp;quot; says Coast Guard MH-60 helicopter pilot Jason Evans, whose crew airlifted six of the workers.  Dec. 31  By morning towlines are in place from the Kulluk to the Aiviq and to a backup tug, the Alert. But the weather worsens, and at about 4:30 pm the Aiviq line fails. The Alert&amp;#039;s engines strain as it attempts to maneuver the rig toward Ocean Bay. At 8:10 pm officials instruct the struggling tug to release its towline, and the Kulluk beaches itself on Sitkalidak Island at 8:48 pm. Jan. 2 to Jan. 6  The weather calms. A salvage team shuttled to the Kulluk finds the fuel tanks intact, the vessel fit to tow. At 10:10 pm on the 6th, the repaired Aiviq tows the Kulluk free from the shoreline for the 52-mile transit to Kiliuda Bay. Through Jan. 11 With the rig in Kiliuda Bay, the Coast Guard orders a marine casualty investigation, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cites Shell for excess nitrogen oxides emissions by both the Kulluk and the Discoverer in 2012.  It won&amp;#039;t lower prices at the pump. A sharp growth in natural gas production has driven down electricity prices for consumers, but we won&amp;#039;t be so lucky when it comes to oil. &amp;quot;The fact that U.S. oil and natural gas production is rising is unbelievably good news for a whole lot of reasons,&amp;quot; says Robert Bryce, an energy policy expert with the Manhattan Institute. Nevertheless, oil prices will still be vulnerable to global fluctuations. &amp;quot;The price of oil is set globally, not locally.&amp;quot; We&amp;#039;ll still rely on oil imports, only less so. As the U.S. nears self-sufficiency in 2035, the IEA predicts that our oil imports will drop from 9.5 million barrels a day to 3.4. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;d continue to import some and export some,&amp;quot; Bryce says. &amp;quot;The reality is we&amp;#039;re going to be even more active on the \u00ADglobal market than we are today, and that&amp;#039;s a good thing.&amp;quot; It would require drastic cuts in fuel consumption. The IEA&amp;#039;s prediction of the U.S.&amp;#039;s near self-\u00ADsufficiency by 2035 relies on the assumption that the nation will reduce its oil consumption by about 25 percent\u20145 million barrels a day\u2014and the U.S. doesn&amp;#039;t have a great track record when it comes to curbing consumption. In fact, Ameri\u00ADcans use about twice as much oil today as they did in 1965. It won&amp;#039;t keep us out of Middle Eastern politics.  Increased domestic production would mean greater independence from OPEC sources, but it wouldn&amp;#039;t insulate us from international politics. The U.S. stations soldiers at the Persian Gulf&amp;#039;s Strait of Hormuz, through which 35 percent of the world&amp;#039;s traded oil travels each day. &amp;quot;Even if the U.S. isn&amp;#039;t importing oil from that part of the world, our trading partners will be,&amp;quot; Columbia University geologist Peter Kelemen says. A blockade could lead to global recession. Increased production is a mixed bag for the environment. New drilling efforts come with added risks. Regarding Arctic offshore drilling, for instance, environmental groups say oil companies have no viable plan to clean up a spill under ice. And, in rare cases, fracking has resulted in groundwater pollution. On the upside, in 2012 the U.S. saw its lowest energy-related carbon dioxide emissions since 1992, in part because electricity producers relied more on natural gas than on coal. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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