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Begich introduces Arctic OCS legislation Bill would establish federal Arctic OCS coordinator position and streamline the process for judicial review of federal permits Alan Bailey Petroleum News
Frustrated by what he sees as an endless cycle of snafus in the permitting of oil and gas projects on Alaska’s outer continental shelf, Sen. Mark Begich has introduced legislation that would establish a federal coordinator for OCS permitting and that would streamline the process for dealing with litigation over permitting decisions.
“I can best describe the (current) situation as regulatory ‘whack a mole’ for developers in Alaska,” Begich said April 18 when announcing his proposed legislation. “Each time we have one mole beat down, another pops up and derails the progress. But this isn’t a game. It’s about the future of Alaska and the energy security of our country.”
During an April 18 press conference Begich particularly criticized the Environmental Protection Agency’s handling of Shell’s air quality permit for the company’s planned Beaufort Sea drilling, with the Environmental Appeals Board remand of that permit having resulted in another delay in the start of Shell’s Alaska OCS drilling program. Shell has been trying to drill exploratory wells in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas for five years and has spent more than $3 billion on its Alaska exploration program, Begich said.
“Business as usual simply isn’t working when it comes to the increased oil and gas development in Alaska. America needs energy from Alaska,” Begich said. “For too long … federal agencies have erected road blocks to that development.”
Coordination needed Begich thinks that a key factor in the permitting logjam is a lack of coordination between different government agencies. So his proposed legislation, called the Outer Continental Shelf Permit Processing Coordination Act, would create a lease and permit coordination office for the Alaska outer continental shelf, with a federal Arctic OCS coordinator heading that office. The Arctic OCS coordinator would perform a role analogous to that of the federal gas pipeline coordinator, working with federal, state and local government agencies involved in OCS permitting, to streamline permit application reviews and permit issuances.
The Department of the Interior would be required to enter into memorandums of agreement with the various government agencies involved, to enable the operation of the coordination process.
In addition, with many of the holdups in OCS exploration resulting from litigation over permitting decisions, Begich’s legislation would streamline the permit judicial review process by requiring all appeals to go directly to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, with a statutory limit of 60 days from an agency permit decision for an appeal to be filed. And the D.C. court would need to give any appeal of this type expedited consideration.
“This legislation does not prevent citizens from solving disputes in the court system,” Begich said. “However, it does recognize that America needs this energy and the issues surrounding it should be solved quickly.”
There needs to be some predictability over the timeframe for the finality of court decisions, he said.
“It’s my view that the legislation that the senator is proposing today could go a long way to addressing some of the regulatory challenges facing responsible offshore development in Alaska,” said Pete Slaiby, Alaska vice president for Shell, the company at the center of the Alaska OCS development debate. Shell agrees that the regulatory bar in Alaska should be high, but the permitting process needs to be both fair and predictable, Slaiby said.
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