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MMS explains its reasons for seismic PEIS
Alan Bailey Petroleum News
Observers of the Alaska oil and gas scene may be wondering why the U.S. Minerals Management Service has decided to prepare a programmatic environmental impact statement for proposed seismic surveys on the outer continental shelf of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.
For a number of years the agency had provided a categorical exclusion from environmental review for seismic work, based on a determination that this type of work did not have a significant environmental impact. But things have changed.
In 2006, amid concerns over the potential cumulative impact of multiple seismic programs during the summer open water season in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, MMS prepared a comprehensive 300-page programmatic environmental assessment that encapsulated all of the seismic activity planned for that year.
Deborah Cranswick, chief of the environmental assessment unit for MMS Alaska OCS Region, explained to Petroleum News on April 24 some of the reasons for preparing a programmatic environmental impact statement in 2007. Preparing an EIS is generally a much more complex undertaking than preparing an environmental assessment.
More concern “What’s changed lately is more information and more concern about the noise impacts on marine mammals,” Cranswick said. “So we were uncomfortable that our old information is still adequate to support a categorical exclusion.”
Additionally, MMS was receiving indications that the level of offshore seismic survey activity was increasing, thus raising concerns about possible significant cumulative impacts. Also, new 3-D seismic techniques have come into use in recent years and the impact of those techniques needs to be considered.
Another consideration was the fact that, whereas it seems likely that offshore seismic work will continue for several years, the 2006 programmatic environmental assessment focused on issues that related to that particular year: MMS would now prefer to prepare a multi-year EIS, rather than repeating the process of preparing a new environmental assessment every year.
Conservative 2006 mitigation And the urgency of preparing an environmental assessment for the 2006 open water season led to very conservative impact mitigation requirements.
“The 2006 EA was very, very specific, just for that year,” Cranswick said. “We were extremely conservative to make sure that we reached a level of impact below significance.”
The EIS process is enabling MMS to consider a broader spectrum of mitigation stipulations, perhaps leading to less extreme requirements. For example, a requirement for a 120-decibel monitoring zone in the 2006 stipulations might perhaps be replaced by a requirement to move to different offshore areas at different times during the open water season.
And the draft PEIS that MMS has published includes some new alternatives for mitigating environmental and subsistence hunting impacts.
“We have also included (for example) an alternative that has exclusion windows, rather than having that be decided through the coordination with the whaling captains,” Cranswick said.
The PEIS is also making use of lessons learned from the 2006 open water season. For example the passive acoustic monitoring implemented in 2006 proved ineffective, Cranswick said.
“It didn’t give us the kind of results that we needed. … It wasn’t detecting anything,” Cranswick said.
Public involvement A key feature of the PEIS process is public involvement beyond what is required for an environmental assessment. The public has been involved in scoping the PEIS — MMS is currently engaged in a program of public hearings. Written comments on the PEIS must be postmarked no later than May 14.
But, although the development of an EIS can often prove to be a multi-year process, the comprehensive nature of the 2006 seismic programmatic environmental assessment has given the PEIS development a head start — the PEA has provided 90 percent of the content of the draft PEIS, Cranswick said. MMS hopes for completion of the PEIS during the summer of 2007, but the timing will depend on the issues that the public raises during the public comment period, Cranswick said.
“It depends on how many comments we get and how complicated they are,” she said.
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