Some big challengesASRC CEO: communities intent on developing economy and preserving culture Alan Bailey Petroleum News
While benefiting financially from the bounty of the oil industry, the Native people of Alaska’s North Slope hold proudly to their traditional culture and their subsistence way of life. However, the North Slope communities face challenges from people who do not live in the Arctic but who covet the Arctic, either as part of some organizational agenda or some national agenda, Rex Rock, president of ASRC, Arctic Slope Regional Corp., told the Resource Development Council’s annual conference on Nov. 19. ASRC is the Native regional corporation for the North Slope.
The challenges Rock said that challenges are coming from environmental organizations “and their never-ending lawsuits,” from the federal government “and its never-ending overreach,” and from the development of Arctic policies without the involvement of Arctic residents. These issues come in the context of a foundation for the prosperity of the communities, set in the past by North Slope community leaders, Rock said.
“All of this history provides a platform for the subsistence lifestyle that nourishes our people and our culture,” he said. “The Arctic has always provided sustenance to the Inupiat. It always has, it still does and it always will.”
Rock emphasized that regional corporations, including ASRC, had supported the defeat of a referendum designed to repeal the recent change to the Alaska oil production tax. The debate around the oil tax issue had improved people’s understanding of how the North Slope Borough’s tax base, derived primarily from the oil industry, had brought benefits such as improved health clinics; improved roads; improved water and sewer systems; and lower cost energy, Rock said.
A local voice Rock said that the North Slope communities have formed a nonprofit group called the Voice of the Arctic Inupiat, to provide a unified voice for all North Slope Inupiat entities in confronting the Arctic ambitions of environmental nongovernment organizations. These organizations oppose Arctic development and have been using Native people as a face for raising money for a global campaign, he said. But those same organizations, whose people do not live in the Arctic, do not provide funding for tribal entities - they will next target the Native subsistence lifestyle, he said.
“The problem we face is they have infiltrated our communities and worked to divide those communities for their goals and fundraising agendas,” Rock said. “Our region has had enough and we’re fighting back.”
Greater Mooses Tooth In illustration of issues relating to the federal government, Rock cited ConocoPhillips’ Greater Mooses Tooth development, an oilfield development in ASRC-owned subsurface estate accessed from federal surface land in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Despite completing an environmental impact statement in 2013, with a plan for the development, the Bureau of Land Management has proposed a permit with significant and costly environmental mitigation measures that may cause the project to become uneconomic, Rock said.
Despite ASRC’s right to develop its lands, acquired from the federal government under the terms of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, BLM is using a heavy-handed implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act to impair the Native corporation’s land rights, Rock said. It appears that as a consequence of hypersensitivity to litigation by nongovernmental organizations the government is over thinking everything, he said.
“We would like to remind the government that GMT-1 (Greater Mooses Tooth) means the development of Native-owned resources, helping all Alaska Natives, and that any mitigation should be proportionate to the development involved,” Rock said.
OCS development Potential offshore oil development on the federal outer continental shelf of Arctic Alaska also provides an example of federal over thinking, Rock said. The Native communities have in the past opposed outer continental shelf development, because, while such development poses risks for offshore subsistence hunting, the communities have not seen themselves as gaining any compensating benefit - Alaska does not have a revenue sharing arrangement for the federal taxes and royalties that would arise from outer continental shelf oil development.
After the federal government issued outer continental shelf leases, despite Native objections, the communities came to a realization that they needed to align with the development, to impart an influence on what was happening and possibly gain some benefit from what was being done.
“To say ‘no’ was no longer a viable option and was not going to change anything,” Rock said.
In the summer of 2014 ASRC and six village corporations formed an organization called Arctic Inupiat Offshore, to partner with Shell in the exploration and development of the company’s Chukchi Sea leases. By sharing risks and benefits with Shell, ASRC and the village corporations will have “skin in the game,” Rock said.
“I strongly believe this was the right thing to do,” he said. “If Shell is successful we will have addressed all our shareholder dividend needs well into the future, just like our past leaders have done for my generation.”
Arctic forums In the context of the Native people having a voice at the Arctic table, Rock commented on the plethora of Arctic forums that are “popping up almost daily.” And the U.S. government is engaged in Arctic policy building at every department level.
“It seems that everybody is on the Arctic policy bandwagon,” Rock said.
But, as receding summer sea ice encourages more vessel traffic into the Arctic Ocean and more interest in Arctic resource development, why are the Arctic policy conversations not taking place near the communities in the Arctic, he asked. While the North Slope communities have been trying to keep abreast of what is happening, traveling to various meetings at considerable cost, they question why they need to travel around the world to talk about their own home.
With the United States taking over in 2015 the chairmanship of the Arctic Council, an international, intergovernmental forum, ASRC will need to be diligent in monitoring the development of new Arctic policies, the decision making of working groups and the issuing of guidelines. And, having formed the Voice of the Arctic Inupiat, the North Slope communities will have an entity for addressing policy issues from a local North Slope perspective, Rock said.
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