An action thriller by Jock Miller


Fossil fuel has an ageless affinity with dinosaurs. To create oil, dinosaurs died.


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The perfect energy storm is sweeping over the United States: Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown has paralyzed nuclear expansion globally, BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill has stalled deep water drilling, Arab oil countries are in turmoil causing doubt about access to future oil, the intensity of hurricanes hitting the Gulf’s oil rigs and refineries has intensified due to global warming, and the nation’s Strategic Oil Supply is riding on empty.

As the energy storm intensifies, the nation’s access to Arab oil, once supplying over sixty percent of our fossil fuel, is being threatened causing people to panic for lack of gas at the pumps, stranding cars across the country and inciting riots.

The U.S. Military is forced to cut back air, land, and sea operations sucking up 58% of every barrel of oil to protect the nation; U.S. commercial airlines are forced to limit flights for lack of jet fuel; and businesses are challenged to power up their factories, and offices as the U.S. Department of Energy desperately tries to provide a balance of electric power from the network of aged power plants and transmission lines that power up the nation.

The United States must find new sources of domestic fossil fuel urgently or face an energy crisis that will plunge the nation into a deep depression worse than 1929.

The energy storm is very real and happening this very moment. But, at the last moment of desperation, the United States discovers the world’s largest fossil fuel deposit found in a remote inaccessible mountain range within Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve surrounding six and a half million acres.

Preventing access to the oil is a colony of living fossil dinosaurs that will protect its territory to the death.

Nobody gets out alive; nobody can identify the predator--until Dr. Kimberly Fulton, Curator of Paleontology at New York’s Museum of Natural History, is flown into the inaccessible area by Scott Chandler, the Marine veteran helicopter pilot who’s the Park’s Manager of Wildlife. All hell breaks loose when Fulton’s teenage son and his girlfriend vanish into the Park.

Will the nation’s military be paralyzed for lack of mobility fuel, and will people across America run out of gas and be stranded, or will the U.S. Military succeed in penetrating this remote mountain range in northwestern Alaska to restore fossil fuel supplies in time to save the nation from the worst energy driven catastrophe in recorded history?

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Energy Policy On Ice

Drilling Risk in Gulf and Arctic 

Floating ice and other challenges confound current efforts to drill for oil off Alaska's coast. (AP PHOTO)


Thousands of miles apart, in vastly disparate environments, the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska's Chukchi Sea have something in common: Both illustrate the increasing futility of an energy policy heavily dependent on oil.

The risks in the Gulf's offshore drilling became brutally apparent in April 2010, when a BP deep-sea well exploded, killing 11 oil rig workers and causing a massive spill of almost 5 million barrels of crude. The disaster led to new regulations for offshore drilling.

In the Chukchi Sea, off Alaska's northwest coast, the challenge is not the depth of the water but the ice upon it. Floating sheets of ice, along with powerful waves, have confounded Royal Dutch Shell's so-far six-year, $5 billion effort to drill offshore. Approaching winter and persistent problems with an oil-containment barge recently forced Shell to postpone its efforts for another year.

The difficulties and risks, both in the Gulf and in the Arctic -- as well as off the east and west U.S. coasts and in shale formations -- were summed up in last Tuesday's Herald-Tribune by Houston Chronicle columnist Loren Steffy: "Quite simply, the easy stuff is gone. All require expensive and time-consuming drilling techniques."

Consequently, claims by candidates or elected officials that America could achieve oil independence if government would only get out of the way are just a lot of hot air.

The U.S. Department of Energy has established that America has only 2 percent of the world's proven oil reserves. Yet, we use 25 percent of the world's supply.

Only the high price of oil (more than $90 a barrel) pushes companies like BP and Shell to attempt to extract it from mile-deep wells or the frigid Arctic seas. Read More
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