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Cribley talks about Alaska challenges Bureau of Land Management challenged to provide for oil, gas development in NPR-A, while protecting world-class natural resources Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
Bud Cribley, the new Alaska state director for the Bureau of Land Management, is new to the state, he told Petroleum News in a Feb. 2 interview, having visited Alaska only twice before being named to head BLM in the state in September.
BLM’s role in Alaska is different than in the other states where it operates, he said, and there’s been a learning curve.
Cribley, who has a B.S. in forestry from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, joined BLM in 1975 and worked in the agency’s livestock grazing program for 15 years before moving into management.
He has held positions in several western states — he was acting state director in Idaho in 2006 — and in BLM’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. He was deputy assistant director for Renewable Resources and Planning when he was named to head the Alaska office.
His past visits to Alaska were in connection with fire issues, said Cribley, who is on the governing board for the joint fire science program and had been in the state twice to look at research activities. BLM is responsible for fires in the northern half of the state; the Alaska Department of Natural Resources has responsibility in the southern half: “We support them down here and they support us up there,” Cribley said.
Fires are getting to be a bigger issue in Alaska, he said, with burning seasons becoming longer and the fires getting bigger and more difficult to deal with.
“And we’re burning in areas we’ve never burned before,” Cribley said. “The North Slope has started to dry” as weather patterns change, and “we’re starting to get large fires on the North Slope itself,” rather than just in the central part of the state.
“We’re getting drying patterns that are significant enough so that the tundra … will burn; and will burn until some kind of a weather event comes along to create enough moisture to stop it,” he said.
Mining, permitting This is Cribley’s first direct involvement with oil and gas issues at BLM, although he dealt with mineral issues as assistant district manager for the Winnemucca District in Nevada where there are hard-rock mining deep-leach gold operations.
At BLM headquarters in Washington, D.C., he worked on the bureau’s oil and gas program from the resource program side, and also did some work on the agency’s leasing reform program, looking at the policy calls involved.
He said most of his experience with oil and gas prior to coming to Alaska was indirect, not direct.
But BLM has a lot of talented and knowledgeable on staff in Alaska, Cribley said, who are working the details of the agency’s involvement with oil and gas development and he’s been working with them to get up to speed.
Programs he oversaw in Washington dealt with the National Environmental Policy Act and land use planning issues, “just not directly on the ground type of activity.”
“The big thing in coming into a job like this is understanding the resource and the issues within the geographic area that you’re working with and then also the people who are involved with it and what they’re dealing with … and then just trying to help coordinate things and … move those programs forward and then making sure how they’re functioning and making sure we’re doing our job,” he said.
Differences in Alaska Cribley said there is a “strong learning curve” in coming to Alaska.
“The nature of the work here in Alaska and the nature of the state is so much different than the rest of the bureau,” he said, calling it a “real experience being exposed to that challenge.”
The land base is huge compared to other BLM western state districts, “but the programs are different from what we traditionally do in the bureau.”
Typically one of the dominant programs in a state is livestock grazing and permitting livestock grazing, he said.
“We don’t even do that here.”
A difference in programs is not the only thing.
Alaska has a whole additional set of laws overlaying the base laws dictating operation of the bureau, such as the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.
East of the Mississippi, for example, BLM manages a lot of subsurface minerals, but only about 30,000 surface acres.
Most of those lands were public at one time, but have been disposed of in different disposal laws dating back to the formation of the United States.
“Alaska is … from the standpoint of maturing, it’s just starting that process that they went through 100, 150-200 years ago,” he said.
So another unique thing about Alaska is where it is in its development, “literally a frontier trying to develop a strong economic base,” and with a lot of lands where “the landscape is basically undeveloped in relation to how it has been down in the West.”
This, Cribley said, creates a challenge with the secretary of the Interior’s new policy on wild lands, “because the perspective is completely different up here and how it’s applied as opposed to how it is down in the western states.”
Literally more than 90 percent of BLM lands in Alaska “technically qualify as wild lands,” but to designate that land “would really choke off any economic development that would depend on those lands and that’s not necessarily a popular idea up here.”
Actual production small Cribley said that as far as the budget the agency receives, oil and gas is one of the more significant programs.
“But conversely … the actual production of oil and gas off of public lands in the state is fairly small.”
There is a lot of potential, he said, and particularly in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska the agency has been “trying to put actions and decisions in place to allow that and we haven’t been successful” yet. One of the goals of the integrated plan for NPR-A that BLM is working on now is trying to analyze potential conflicts between resources and “try to put together a plan that can hopefully create assurances to industry that … it’s worth their effort to invest into that area and to start developing the oil and gas resources in that area.”
He said it’s a high priority issue within the agency and noted that the secretary of the Interior has come to Alaska several times and has toured NPR-A.
The scoping period for the plan has closed and BLM is working with its cooperating agencies (the Fish and Wildlife Service; the North Slope Borough; the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement; the State of Alaska) to develop alternatives. The goal is to have the plan done and the record of decision signed by the end of 2012, which means a draft at the end of this year or early next year, followed by a public comment period.
Cribley said a lot of people are watching what’s going on and there are lot of expectations on all sides as to what BLM should be analyzing and what the decision should be.
“And it’s probably about as diverse a group as I’ve probably ever had the opportunity to work with as far as issues go on a particular piece of ground,” he said.
The area “has world-class resources, literally,” he said. “I mean that’s literally a place that … National Geographic and (others) go to film, to demonstrate … the wealth of wildlife resources, so it is truly a world-class or international class of habitat.”
And that “just draws that much more attention, and it’s not just national, but international attention drawn to the decisions that will be made.”
In addition to known oil and gas resources and its world-class habitat, there is the issue of the new order Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued on wild lands which “creates additional expectations and additional challenges in writing a balanced document.”
While the secretarial order came out after the end of the scoping period, Cribley said the issue of lands with wilderness characteristics was identified in scoping because the agency knew, based on lawsuits that had occurred in Oregon, that there would be, at a minimum, a requirement to “inventory for and identify lands with wilderness characteristics.”
It was because of 9th Circuit Court rulings that the secretary issued the policy, Cribley said, so that the bureau would have clear guidance on how to handle those issues.
In the past, BLM only addressed wilderness characteristics when the public identified areas to be analyzed.
The 9th Circuit ruled that based on the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the legislation which provides BLM direction to retain and manage unallocated federal land, that BLM was “required to maintain an inventory of lands with wilderness characteristics.” l
See part 2 of this story in the Feb. 27 issue.
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