The villagers of Nuiqsut on the Beaufort Sea coast just east of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska look out on the nearby industrial facilities of the Alpine oil field where once there was only arctic tundra and lakes. And a growing network of North Slope pipelines, roads and industrial plant has eroded the area of land usable for the subsistence hunting that the Native people depend on for food.
Now, faced with an accelerating rate of oil and gas exploration in NPR-A between the Alpine field and the city Barrow, North Slope residents are feeling increasingly nervous about the potential impact of industrial development on their way of life.
In response to these community concerns the North Slope Borough is developing an oil and gas plan that is focusing on finding ways of enabling NPR-A development to proceed while minimizing adverse community impacts. Funded by grants from federal NPR-A oil revenues, the study is seeking collaborative ways to address the community issues.
“We want to make sure that we have the right kind of mechanism in place, so that this development is able to proceed with as little impact as possible on our communities,” Daniel Forster, deputy director North Slope Borough Planning Department, told Petroleum News Nov. 15. “… The borough supports oil and gas development. We want to see it continue. We want to make sure at the same time that our villages are protected.
“The belief is that both the communities and oil and gas development can occur and both can flourish.”
A prime objective of the oil and gas plan is to avoid a piecemeal industrial sprawl across NPR-A and, instead, to plan the industrial infrastructure in a coordinated manner.
We want “consolidated or coordinated infrastructure development through NPR-A, so we don’t get that spider’s web kind of effect,” Forster said. “It’s a more efficient alignment of roads and pipes and all of that core infrastructure. It’s also making sure that we do whatever is possible to avoid impact on our subsistence economy.”
Broader application
Although NPR-A forms the focus of the oil and gas plan, the findings of the plan will likely have impacts throughout the North Slope Borough. For example, development policies for NPR-A may have application elsewhere.
In addition, the issues that the plan addresses impact multiple jurisdictions, and not just the borough. And, obviously, the oil industry itself is a key player.
“We must recognize that the issues that are facing development in NPR-A are bigger than any one jurisdiction,” Forster said. “They’re bigger than the federal government, the state government, the borough. They’re bigger than any one industry group.”
Jon Isaacs, a senior planner with URS Corp. and a consultant for the oil and gas plan development, emphasized the importance of finding common ground between all of these different stakeholders.
“The intent of this whole plan is to be very proactive, to get the players together — the state agencies, the borough, the communities, the industry — and say ‘how can we find solutions?’” Isaacs said.
The planning team is also anxious to include the traditional knowledge of the Native peoples in the planning process.
“There’s a whole arena of how traditional knowledge is going to be utilized in this process,” Forster said. “We want to bring that forward as a body of knowledge on its own merits. It should be factored into the decision making process.”
Real impacts
The North Slope communities recognize the positive economic benefits of the oil industry but the communities also value their traditional culture, sense of identity and sense of place — living in the middle of an industrial complex just isn’t the same as living in an arctic wilderness.
“Now in Nuiqsut you can easily see infrastructure, you can see flares, so the landscape around the community has just changed,” said Joan Kluwe, an environmental scientist with URS. “Even if industry has a policy that will allow hunters to pass through, sometimes people just still feel unwelcome. They don’t feel like it’s their own home place any more. They feel that they’re the visitor instead of the resident.”
NPR-A oil and gas leases now all but surround Barrow and the village of Atqasuk to the south. Will these communities end up in a similar situation to Nuiqsut?
Of particular concern is the potential impact on subsistence hunting. Villagers from Nuiqsut now have to travel farther to reach hunting areas, Forster said. And people worry about the possibility of additional silt in rivers and the consequent impact on fishing.
Increased helicopter traffic is already becoming a problem in NPR-A, although it is not clear how much of this traffic directly relates to oil exploration.
“This summer in particular we had numerous, numerous complaints about helicopters interrupting caribou when hunters were just about to take their shot,” Forster said. “A helicopter would fly by and the caribou would move off.”
Potential health impacts are another concern.
“People in Nuiqsut are finding an increased incidence of asthma but the cause and effect relationship hasn’t been clearly demonstrated,” Forster said.
And the North Slope residents, many with ancestry going back perhaps 1,000 years, worry about what will happen to the industrial infrastructure once oil and gas production has ceased.
“(The North Slope communities), they’re going to be here a thousand years from now but the oil industry probably won’t be. … We want to make sure that what is on the ground is handled appropriately when it’s over,” Forster said, adding that the mess left by very early oil and gas exploration has left bitter memories, even although people understand that the current oil and gas industry was not responsible for that.
Cumulative impacts
The cumulative impacts of multiple development projects lie at the core of any assessment of the community impacts within an area such as NPR-A. Yet these cumulative impacts can prove particularly difficult to assess and deal with.
For example, the coordination of the total infrastructure required for multiple developments could adversely impact an individual project. Should the first company to develop in an area have to build a pipeline that it doesn’t need and what incentives might there be for developers to deal with the planning issues?
“You don’t want to penalize an individual project unduly but you have to address it,” Isaacs said. Isaacs also commented that technical advances, such as those leading to the reduced size of the industrial footprint, have helped mitigate impacts.
Isaacs said that it is necessary also to assess the cumulative impacts of developments both inside and outside NPR-A — you cannot look at just a single region in isolation.
“This is something that’s been recognized as a real need for a long time,” Isaacs said.
Another hot issue is the question of a more programmatic approach to assessing cumulative impacts on the North Slope, rather than piecemealing impact assessments between different agencies and different projects.
“Things are happening so fast on such a large scale that if you could have a programmatic areawide cumulative effects (approach) that other agencies could feed off, you’d be having a common ground. … The question is who funds it, who sponsors it?” Forster said.
What about scientific research into cumulative effects, for example?
“Where are our data gaps? What sort of research is needed to get ahead of the curve, to find out what your baseline is?” Isaacs asked, speculating that the North Slope Science Institute in Barrow might have a future role as a science clearinghouse.
Workshops and focus groups
The borough thinks that its collaborative planning approach offers the best chance of identifying impacts and finding ways of mitigating those impacts. As a consequence the planning team has held a series of stakeholder workshops, to identify and discuss the issues.
Workshops in Barrow and Nuiqsut in the spring of 2006 involved the North Slope villages, Native tribes and the Native corporations. These workshops entailed discussions of issues and needs, and identified what topics the oil and gas plan should address.
A similar workshop in Anchorage brought together representatives from the state and federal agencies; the petroleum industry; and environmental groups.
“We went through the same sort of workshop, to introduce them to the plan, what we wanted to accomplish, get some of their issues and concerns on the table,” Isaacs said.
The planning team then wrote up the results of the workshops and circulated the results to the participants for comment.
A major emphasis of the workshops was the compilation of information about the current situation regarding the operation of the North Slope oil and gas industry — the team has been anxious not to “reinvent the wheel.”
“(We have been) trying to look at where is there existing planning and regulatory coverage and where are there some gaps particularly with regard to these topics,” Isaacs explained. Isaacs also commented that, as part of its analysis, the planning team has been assessing the current status of North Slope oil development and oil development plans “so we can get this picture of the overall scale of current and future oil and gas development.”
The team also established three focus groups, to tackle specific areas of concern.
One of those groups has looked at the lack of coordinated planning between entities such as the North Slope Borough, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the State of Alaska. A second group focused on the decommissioning, dismantling and removal of oilfield facilities — what are people doing about this and what can be done to plan ahead?
Discussion around the third focus topic, the use of traditional knowledge, looks likely to take longer than anticipated.
“We actually were planning to try to do that by the end of the year, but the interest in that has increased so much that we’re thinking of having an expanded workshop in January,” Isaacs said.
Isaacs said that the workshops and focus groups have proved very successful.
“We’ve been pleased … that this has already been a very collaborative and educational process,” Isaacs said. “It’s been a great forum to get the different groups together to talk about some of these challenges and come up with solutions.”
He also said the biggest challenge has been compiling the meeting results and ensuring that participants’ views are accurately represented in both the documentation of the issues and in the formulation of solutions.
Technical report
Isaacs emphasized that the oil and gas plan will consist of a technical report rather than a regulatory document.
“The intent is to put together a technical report which goes over the purpose and objectives of the study — what are the issues out there that need to be addressed. … What exists in the way of regulatory coverage and also has some background information on the nature of current oil and gas development? And then we have recommendations and suggestions on how to move forward to address some of these challenges,” Isaacs said.
And Forster said that, in addition to recommendations, he hopes that the plan will include specific agreements between different stakeholders, perhaps in the form of memoranda of understanding.
“If through this process we can get people to collaboratively agree on approaches and principles … and we actually put mechanisms in place, that is a nice way to start implementation of these recommendations,” Forster said.
Forster said that the oil and gas plan will dovetail with the comprehensive plan that the North Slope Borough has recently completed (editor’s note: the borough has developed its comprehensive plan to chart a course for the borough’s future from a broad range of perspectives).
“This (oil and gas) plan will be consistent with the comprehensive plan but there will be additional goals and policies that it might identify that the comprehensive plan might be lacking,” Forster said.
The oil and gas plan will also likely impact Title 19, the borough’s land management regulations and land zoning ordinances. The borough has been revising Title 19 for some time — work on the comprehensive plan and the oil and gas plan has delayed completion of the Title 19 revisions.
But Forster emphasized that, although the oil and gas plan may drive some further changes to Title 19, the borough still has the industry comments that were documented as part of the Title 19 upgrade process and that the borough will not require industry to repeat its input to that process.
Oil and gas summit
Meantime, Mayor Itta of the North Slope is organizing an oil and gas summit in Barrow, with participation from the community, industry and government agencies. The oil and gas plan will likely be one of the focus items at that summit, Forster thinks.
And timing for the completion of the plan?
“We’ll probably have a draft report some time after the first of the year,” Forster said. The borough would first approve release of the report to the public and then there would be a round of meetings in the villages to go over the draft report, he said.
But Forster again emphasized the collaborative nature of the plan.
“I don’t want people to feel threatened by this,” he said. “… We want to be constructive partners with other government agencies and industry to nurture this and usher it forward in a responsible fashion.”
