Slemons: changing direction a challenge

Jonne Slemons, coordinator of the State of Alaska’s new Petroleum Systems Integrity Office, updated House Resources June 7 on some of the regulatory issues related to oil transit lines and other oil and gas facilities.

Prior to 2006, she said, there was “general ignorance of the fact that there was a regulatory gap” for the oil transit lines, lines which take sales-ready oil from production centers to the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

The Office of Pipeline Safety in the U.S. Department of Transportation typically regulates such lines, but North Slope lines were not covered because “there were some exemptions within the federal regulations … (for) lines that were in remote areas of very low population.”

That gap was filled by Congress in late 2006 when it expanded the authority of the Office of Pipeline Safety, Slemons said.

And the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation was in the process — even before the March 2006 spill — of expanding its regulatory authority to cover flow lines, those lines that run between the wellhead and the production centers.

“In terms of pipelines, I believe that regulatory gaps have been addressed,” Slemons said in response to a question from Rep. Max Gruenberg, D-Anchorage.

One of the primary tasks of PSIO, she said, is to do a statutory and regulatory gap analysis “to ensure that any gaps remaining anywhere on state lands, regarding oil and gas, are discovered. And we are in the process of performing that gap analysis now.”

Rep. Paul Seaton, R-Homer, asked Slemons if she was comfortable with changes BP is making as operator.

“BP is implementing significant, very broad, very deep and far-ranging changes to their organization,” Slemons said, most of which are “in response to requirements placed upon them by the Office of Pipeline Safety through various consent orders that have come down.”

She said it is her impression that BP is “sincere in wanting to fix the problems that have been discovered and to mend their ways, if you will. My own personal concern is that a ship the size of BP doesn’t turn on a dime. And changing organizational culture is a very difficult thing to do.”

Slemons said BP has been responsive to the PSIO and she understands it has also been responsive to the Office of Pipeline Safety.

Asked by Seaton about the extent of PSIO authority, Slemons said facilities “such as production centers, modules, gas processing facilities, those kinds of things” have largely escaped regulatory oversight, other than labor, OSHA and fire detection.

“It is one of the missions of the PSIO to fill those gaps and we will be looking at facilities, not just pipelines, in the system integrity plans that we will be requiring from the unit operators.”

Slemons said PSIO will be assessing the technical sufficiency of the plans and will be performing on-site assessments to ensure the operators comply with the plans that are established.

—Kristen Nelson