The U.S. Department of the Interior will soon move forward on the steps to schedule an oil and gas lease sale in the 1002 area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, David Bernhardt, deputy secretary of the department, told a joint meeting of Commonwealth North and the Alaska Support Industry Alliance on March 8. The first step will be a notice of intent in the Federal Register for the scoping process for an environmental review, Bernhardt said.
In December the U.S. Congress passed a tax bill that included language opening the 1002 area for oil and gas exploration and development. The 1002 area, on the North Slope coastal plain, is the only part of ANWR where oil and gas activities can be allowed. But, under the terms of the Alaska National Interest Lands Act, opening the area to oil and gas required an act of Congress, a legislative hurdle that has now been crossed many years after ANILCA itself was passed.
Scoping study to begin
The act opening the 1002 area requires two lease sales within 10 years, the first within four years and each offering at least 400,000 acres of subsurface land. But, under the terms of the National Environmental Policy Act, Interior must first conduct a review of the potential environmental impact of a sale. The first step in this review will be a scoping study, including a 60-day public review period, to enable Interior to make a decision on conducting the sale and determining what form of environmental review to conduct, Bernhardt said. The likely outcome will be a decision to prepare an environmental impact statement for the sale, he suggested.
Bernhardt said that he and Joe Balash, Interior’s assistant secretary for land and minerals management, who also spoke at the meeting, were visiting Alaska as part of preparations for the scoping process. They had already visited the North Slope, informing people there about what is happening.
EIS in one year
Although it has typically taken a federal agency about two years to prepare an EIS of the type required for the lease sale, Bernhardt is optimistic that efficiencies being introduced in Interior will compress that timeframe to just one year. He said that he had issued a memo to Interior personnel indicating that he expects any EIS to be completed in a year.
“We’re starting this process very, very soon and I take my memos very, very seriously,” he said.
Under the terms of the statute that opened the 1002 area for oil and gas development, exploration and development will be conducted using the same procedures and regulations as are used in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
Bernhardt later told reporters that, as far as he is aware, nobody has at this point requested permission to conduct a seismic survey in the 1002 area. A request relating to a seismic survey would go through its own NEPA review process, with other statutes such as the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammals Protection Act potentially involved, he said.
Regulatory roll back
Bernhardt characterized his department’s first year under the leadership of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke as very productive in rolling back what the administration views as overzealous regulation. This approach is no accident, given the way in which President Trump’s speeches during the presidential election campaign had made the regulatory agenda clear, Bernhardt said. But Bernhardt emphasized that regulatory simplification would not come at the expense of environmental standards.
“We’re not willing to sacrifice health, safety or environmental standards, but we are committed to being a good neighbor, respecting the role of other governments and being passionate about ensuring that people have access to our public lands,” Bernhardt said.
NPR-A
Balash commented that Interior is seeking opportunities to expand the acreage available for oil and gas leasing in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
“That’s something that is going to require a lot of care and consultation with the North Slope Borough,” he said.
He said that he and Bernhardt had met with North Slope Borough Mayor Harry Brower and had identified topics to deal with together, while also ensuring regular communications between the borough and Interior, making certain that subsistence resources are protected while also enabling access to the natural resources of the region.
Bernhardt said that last year Congress had helped the administration by using the Congressional Review Act to cancel recently implemented new agency rules. That saved the time that agency management would have needed to expend on changing regulations through the Administrative Procedures Act, thus freeing up time to deal with new issues, Bernhardt said.
In addition to dealing with oil and gas exploration in ANWR and the NPR-A, Interior is now focusing on a number of urgent issues, including a large backlog of maintenance requirements in national parks, and improvements to the Indian school system, Bernhardt said.
Another major focus is the reorganization of the Department of the Interior, to achieve greater efficiencies. An important component of this is to identify common boundaries between the various bureaus within the department, to explore how to operate more effectively within those boundaries. In some areas responsibilities are shared between different bureaus, Bernhardt said.
The EIS process
Bernhardt explained how efficiencies may be achieved in the case of the EIS development process, where he anticipates these efficiencies translating to a much-compressed timeframe.
The current procedures involve what is referred to as the “surname process,” a process in which a document package for an EIS is passed around 30 or so people in the department for their review and initialing before being posted in the Federal Register. This process was originally introduced in 2001, following concern by a department chief of staff about department decisions being published without his knowledge, Bernhardt said.
But the entire process of moving a draft document from a Bureau of Land Management state director through the lines of authority in the Department of the Interior can take up to 90 days. Then, given the fact that the notice of intent for preparing an EIS, the notice of availability for a draft EIS and the notice of availability for a final EIS all have to go through this process, the process can add 270 days to the elapsed time to prepare and publish an EIS, Bernhardt said.
Options for improvement
Instead, Bernhardt has introduced a procedure whereby only the state director and a department lawyer need sign off on a document, before the document goes to Balash, Bernhardt and Zinke for final approval, with strict time limits for the approval reviews. The department is also tracking the quality of the documents, to ensure that people writing the documents do so effectively, Bernhardt said.
Another possibility is incorporating documents into an EIS by reference, rather than replicating document contents. Currently an EIS can range in length from 8,000 to 25,000 pages, with appendices. So, given that no one planner will read the entire contents, the EIS documents are not really serving their original purpose, Bernhardt suggested.
“The purpose of NEPA is to ensure that we take a hard look at issues, that we’ve looked at a reasonable range of alternatives, and that we have had proper participation, to ensure that we, as federal decision makers, are more fully informed before we make our decision, whatever it’s going to be,” Bernhardt said.
