Barrow, Alaska --

Even if Shell strikes oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, it could be at least a dozen years - and billions upon billions of dollars - before a single drop of it arrives at a refinery.

Here, far above the Arctic Circle, there is no network of pipelines snaking along the seabed. There are no deep-water ports. Even docks can be hard to come by.

The entire infrastructure to support offshore development in a hostile climate would have to be built from scratch.

"The big technical challenge in the Arctic is simply the scale of it, because there is no infrastructure," said Charlie Williams, a recently retired chief scientist at Shell who sits on a federal drilling safety advisory committee. "It's the sheer scale of putting in all the pipelines and all the platforms, and then putting in all the shore bases to support that."

While exploratory oil drilling in the region is generally done with rigs on floating vessels, year-round oil production and development drilling probably would be done by rigs on stationary platforms installed directly in the seabed - structures that have never been placed in U.S. Arctic waters before.

Finding oil is just the beginning, said Pete Slaiby, the Shell Alaska vice president who is spearheading the company's Arctic venture.

"If we are blessed with development, there's going to be a huge amount of work," Slaiby said, including technological development, government approvals, pipeline construction and far-reaching federally mandated environmental studies.

"It will be, I think, the largest environmental impact statement done in North America," Slaiby added. As a result, any production "will be at least a decade away, and probably longer in the Chukchi."

Thick sheets of ice

The platforms that operate hundreds of miles out in the temperate Gulf of Mexico are of no use in the Arctic, where sheets of ice dozens of feet thick cover the water for much of the year.

Unlike Shell's exploratory drilling this summer, which was limited to a brief "open water" season when ice wasn't covering the sea, a year-round production schedule would demand robust equipment that could withstand icebergs, freezing sea spray and other weather-related threats.

Williams said the industry can draw on experience penetrating other frontier areas and adapt equipment engineered for similarly harsh offshore environments, such as the North Sea.

"I actually think we have good solutions to the technical challenges right now," Williams said.

Current cleanup methods are geared toward warmer water. Regulators will probably insist on new techniques for dealing with oil spills, including equipment to track the movement of spilled crude trapped under ice, and to clean it up. Monitoring options identified in a joint industry study include using oil-sniffing dogs, aerial surveillance, radar and buoys that could move with frozen crude.

Federal regulators will watch closely, vowed Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes.

"This is a frontier area we need to be cautious about," Hayes said. "We are not precluding obviously exploration and potentially production, but we recognize the sensitivities associated with the Arctic and the need to proceed with the best science and best technical input," while respecting the subsistence needs of Alaskan Natives who fish and hunt in the same waters.

Production platforms

Shell's potential production platform design would use a stadium-size base filled with concrete and iron, and have an enclosed facility looming high above the water to avoid deadly ice ridges. It would use a process known as brute-force engineering to withstand first-year, new ice that can pile up underwater, and multiyear ice, which tends to be made of a stronger, freshwater crystal because salt has migrated out.

Shell spokeswoman Kelly op de Weegh said the structure would weigh at least 100,000 tons and be a multibillion-dollar investment.

Existing Arctic pipelines provide a model of what could link Chukchi and Beaufort Sea wells with facilities on land, probably running across the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to connect with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Station in Prudhoe Bay. Although the pipeline feeding BP's NorthStar facility on a man-made island 6 miles from the Alaska coast is a single-wall structure, two more recent Arctic projects use pipe-in-pipe designs that allow room for insulation and an extra barrier against leaks. Those pipelines are generally buried 6 to 9 feet below the seabed.

Duane DeGeer, manager of Arctic projects at the Houston design firm Intecsea, said research is already under way to discern how deep ice has historically gouged into the seabed of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, which would dictate how far down a pipeline would have to be buried. Pipelines also would have to be designed to withstand the possibility of water slipping through cracks in sea ice, eroding the sea floor and exposing buried pipe. And when pipelines make landfall, they would need to be kept underground long enough to clear decades of eroding shoreline to come.

Although federal regulators would have to approve the design decisions made by Shell or its competitors, there are no Arctic-specific standards that would govern those options.

Engineers, environmentalists and regulators sitting on the Interior Department's offshore safety advisory committee appear likely to recommend that the government impose baseline standards for Arctic offshore drilling, coastal production facilities and pipelines.

Cleanup difficult

Environmentalists insist that Arctic standards would help set a floor for protections in this remote and fragile region. They note that while accidents happen everywhere, when they happen above the Arctic Circle - even on land - they're much more difficult to clean up.

But Hayes said operations and safeguards in the U.S. Arctic can be a model for the rest of the world.

"We are very interested in being the leading edge here, of being a gold standard for Arctic exploration," he said. "Because regardless of what happens in the U.S., there is no question there is going to be offshore development ... in the other Arctic nations."