The State of Alaska has been pushing ahead with plans for a Bullen Point Road to connect the road system at Prudhoe Bay with the oil and gas prospects near Point Thomson, towards the eastern end of the North Slope, Patty Miller, northern region design group chief for the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, told Petroleum News in early December. Meantime the state has suspended work on a proposed road into the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, west from the Spine Road that passes through the Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk oil fields. Instead DOT wants to focus on the Bullen Point Road, Miller said.Changing priorities
For several years the state has been planning industrial roads in support of the North Slope oil industry — the state has anticipated that these roads would encourage increased economic activity that would then provide a return on the investment in road construction.
But the plans regarding what roads to construct have changed over time.
Early in 2003 the top priority was the westward extension of the Spine Road, including the construction of a bridge across the Colville River. At that time DOT also envisaged constructing a road west from the Dalton Highway from a new road junction on the south side of the North Slope; that road would extend west through the foothills before turning north to connect to the village of Nuiqsut on the Beaufort Sea coast.
By November 2003 the southern road option had started to take shape, with a route outlined that would require a 3,200-foot bridge across the Colville River. Mike McKinnon, the then senior planner for DOT, thought that road construction could start as early as 2006.
By November 2004 DOT had four road ideas on its books: the original idea of a westward Spine Road extension, a foothills road west from the Dalton Highway, a foothills road east from the Dalton Highway and a 50 to 60-mile coastal route east from the central North Slope to state leases as far east as the Point Thomson area. Then, in April of this year, the state said that it was moving ahead with the engineering for the eastward coastal road, now known as the Bullen Point Road.
Data collection
With the Bullen Point Road now taking center stage, Anchorage-based engineering consultants PND Inc. collected data for that route this summer.
“We’ve done some engineering field studies and done a little bit of the preliminary engineering through our consultant,” Miller said.
Work has included topographic surveys, hydrologic surveys and breakup surveys, she said. DOT now has the preliminary ice design criteria and has drafted a report on road design criteria. The design team has determined some potential road routes and stream crossing sites.
The potential routes for the route entirely involve state land, thus triggering the need for a state right of way. However, DOT has been able to share some of the data collection costs with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources. DNR has to carry out similar work in connection with pipeline rights of way that it has applied for to link future oil and gas developments on the eastern North Slope with the Prudhoe Bay complex.
“We have been working with the Department of Natural Resources on the project and we’ll continue to do that,” Miller said. “They’re working on a pipeline right of way.”
Environmental impact statement
Because the potential routes for the Bullen Point Road cross wetlands DOT will have to apply to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a wetlands permit. That permit will likely trigger the need for an environmental impact statement.
“We are hoping to get a Corps permit application in this winter,” Miller said.
The Corps is particularly interested in hydrology data and there’s very little of that type of data for the area of the potential road routes, Miller said.
“So we’ve had to do some baseline data collection,” she said.
But uncooperative weather during the summer prevented the shooting of the aerial photographs needed for some of the data collection.
“We did try to get aerial photos this year and never did get them because of weather,” Miller said.
In the meantime the team is making do with some satellite imagery. But unfortunately this type of imagery doesn’t cover the entire area at the required resolution, Miller said. Miller is hopeful that the team can recover any time lost as a result of the lack of aerial photographs — she expects the EIS to take about two years to complete. That would place the start of road construction in 2008, she said.
Strategies for the Foothills
Plans for a road through the Brooks Range Foothills west from the Dalton Highway have now evolved into an investigation into whether to build a series of airports and staging areas in place of all or part of the road that people envisaged a year ago. DOT is now looking at an access route into an area extending about 40 miles west of the highway — Miller said that there were concerns about a caribou calving area in the path of the north-south section of the originally proposed road.
“There are a number of different alternatives for getting into that area,” Miller said. “We’re weighing whether to take a road in all the way or have a system of airports that would have the ability to build roads off from those airports, either ice roads in the beginning or gravel roads.”
This winter DOT is looking at these alternatives and at route alignments, with a view to doing some fieldwork next year; fieldwork would address environmental and engineering issues. One consideration for planning any airport locations is the feasibility of ice road construction in the area — that might require placing airports slightly north of the foothills.
Although the north-south segment of the original road plan included a Colville River crossing into the northern part of NPR-A, Miller thinks that a westward extension to the Spine Road would include the river crossing instead.
DOT is no longer planning a Foothills road east from the Dalton Highway, although it did look at the possibility of aligning the Bullen Point Road from a point on the Dalton Highway on the south side of the North Slope. The advantage of that route would be a relatively short crossing over the Sagavanirktok River. But the relative length of the route and the difficulty of road construction in hilly country outweigh any benefits.
“There’s enough disadvantages that it doesn’t look like it’s the preferred alternative,” Miller said.
