A test project will use polymers to try to unlock untapped heavy oil on Alaska’s North Slope

U.S. Department of Energy, the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Hilcorp Energy Company will test out a new technique to reach the difficult oil that makes up a large part of Alaska's North Slope reserves.

Overlaying the prolific oil reservoirs that have fed production of the Alaska North Slope oil fields for the past four decades is a completely different and untapped resource — tens of billions of barrels of heavy oil in shallower geologic formations that have, at least so far, confounded the energy companies operating in that Arctic region.