It’s been little more than a year since the U.S. Energy Policy Act formalized the existence of the North Slope Science Initiative, an inter-agency effort to provide a consistent approach to high-caliber science across the North Slope. And since then NSSI has been moving ahead with its role of facilitating a more coordinated approach to scientific research in the region, and acting as a clearinghouse for North Slope scientific knowledge.
Ken Taylor, NSSI executive director, explained to Petroleum News that NSSI evolved from a research and monitoring team established in 1998 to address environmental issues in northeast National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, as part of the opening of that part of NPR-A for oil and gas leasing. A recognition that a set of similar issues applied to more than just NPR-A led to an interest in expanding the research and monitoring area to encompass the whole North Slope and adjacent offshore regions.
In 2003 a group of interagency staff began to design a working model for NSSI and an NSSI oversight group was formed. The oversight group consists of executive leadership from the various federal, state and municipal government agencies involved in the North Slope. Arctic Slope Regional Corp. is also represented.
The Bureau of Land Management contracted the design of a Web portal for the initiative. The Altarum Institute carried out an information needs assessment and the Argonne National Labs prepared a draft science plan. And in 2004 members of the NSSI group conducted workshops in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Barrow to assess the information needs of people with an interest in the environmental science of the North Slope.
Charter in 2004
The oversight group adopted an NSSI charter in 2004 and in 2005 the U.S. Congress formally recognized NSSI in the Energy Policy Act. Taylor was appointed as executive director in 2005. In 2006 the secretary of the Interior appointed a science and technical group, consisting of a multidisciplinary team of scientists who can provide technical advice to the oversight group.
So far, NSSI funding has come from the government agencies involved in the oversight group.
“For the last two years most of the member agencies have pitched in a small portion of the cost,” Taylor said. “BLM has covered the brunt of the cost of what we’ve done to date.”
President Bush’s 2007 budget includes specific funding for NSSI but Congress has not yet approved that budget, Taylor said.
Information needs identified from NSSI workshops in 2004 drive some of the organization’s priorities. People attending those workshops requested information about what North Slope science is being done, who is doing it and where it is being done, Taylor said. People also wanted access to scientific study results through a single point of contact. And there was a strong desire for a single geographic information system (or GIS) to retrieve and display mapped data about the North Slope.
“I think we count about 75 (geographic information systems) right now,” Taylor said.
For 2006 the oversight group also set NSSI objectives to identify and prioritize scientific information needs, and to coordinate scientific activities, to minimize duplication of effort.
Research priorities
So what are some of the scientific research areas that NSSI is monitoring?
The impact of the oil and gas industry on caribou sits high on the list of priority areas and for the past few years NSSI has been funding a study entitled “The Effects of Oilfield Infrastructure on Caribou Demography, Distribution and Movements,” Taylor said.
Taylor said that the caribou calving grounds have changed a little more in developed areas of the slope than in undeveloped areas.
“The concern is that as these calving areas move more and more towards the foothills will predation increase?” Taylor said. “… We are having a caribou workshop scheduled for Feb. 21 and 22 in Fairbanks to look at how the caribou herds are monitored, what research is going on related to oil and gas development, what data gaps might exist, look at all of the various stipulations.”
Taylor said that the conference will assess the extent to which current permit stipulations are science based and what additional science might be needed in specifying stipulations.
Other wildlife research topics monitored by NSSI include the disturbance of nesting and molting waterfowl.
Water is also a major North Slope issue, with relatively little hydrologic information available. There are only three river water gauging stations on the entire North Slope, an area roughly the size of Utah, Taylor said. Increasing the amount of data available would, for example, improve the accuracy with which flood predictions can be made.
“So we’ve found funding to establish four additional gauges in NPR-A,” Taylor said.
Ongoing NSSI projects include the trial use of robotic equipment for water quality testing on the North Slope. That type of equipment could greatly help in collecting the baseline environmental data that are essential to an understanding of industry impacts.
Water withdrawals
During the winter exploration season companies draw water from lakes for ice road construction. Although there are regulated limits on how much water can be withdrawn, NSSI would like to understand more about the impact of water withdrawals.
“We have a limit on how much can be pumped but until recently there hasn’t been much science behind that limit,” Taylor said. “We just know we’ve been doing it for years — it seems to be working and the fish are surviving, but it may be having some other effects that we don’t know.”
NSSI is also interested in the issue of where fish on the North Slope go during the winter freeze up. Apparently artesian water is common under the North Slope and some fish winter at places where that artesian water upwells in rivers.
Culverts used for stream crossings present another issue.
“It’s difficult to build a culvert battery that’s (drill) rig capable but doesn’t cause sedimentation scouring and allows the passage of fish,” Taylor said.
Taylor said that the Alaska Department of Natural Resources has been monitoring the condition of culverts on the North Slope and has also been investigating new culvert battery designs for possible use on the slope.
The potential impact of oil spills is also a major environmental concern, but NSSI has not focused on that issue because several government agencies are already doing so, Taylor said.
Community impacts
The effect of the oil and gas infrastructure on traditional subsistence use areas of the North Slope forms a topic of significant concern. And, curiously, the impact of scientific research itself on the North Slope communities is becoming an issue.
“One of our challenges is going to be how do we keep the research community from overwhelming the communities,” Taylor said. “… That’s a real problem … when you look at any development up there and the requirements for scientific research and monitoring that are placed on that development. That equates to lots of helicopter flights, lots of fixed-wing flights, people on the ground. It’s not insignificant.”
Offshore, Taylor sees a role for NSSI in facilitating the use of vessel capacity for scientific research — vessel usage typically adds major expense to offshore research.
“One of the critical pieces for offshore research that’s missing on the North Slope is vessel time and most of the vessels that will be out there will be industry vessels,” Taylor said. “I just think there’s a lot of opportunity with all the work that’s going on out there to collect some good science at the same time.”
Projects database and GIS
Meantime, NSSI is forging ahead with a key strategy of making scientific information more available to people.
A spreadsheet-based database with information about science projects carried out on the North Slope region is now available online at the NSSI Web site.
NSSI is in the final stages of converting its database to work with projects database software developed by the North Pacific Research Board. The result will be a database with a slick user interface and greatly improve search capabilities.
“This provides the first two things that people want — who’s doing what and where, and access to their information in one place for current work,” Taylor said. “That will be very useful I think in putting together the environmental documents for various agencies.”
Another NSSI objective, the development of a consolidated GIS for the North Slope, will require substantial funding and will depend on approval of NSSI funds in the federal budget. The concept is to make as much North Slope mapped data as possible accessible through a single computer interface.
“We’ve been working with the Geographic Information Network of Alaska (or GINA) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks to develop a system that could be easily used by anyone who wants all of the various GIS data layers,” Taylor said. Each data layer would contain a specific type of data, such as lands records, topographic information or vegetation information.
NSSI has assembled an inventory of all of the data layers that are potentially available from various government agencies. Under the NSSI concept, each agency would continue to maintain its data layers but would make those layers available to the GINA system.
“In order to make this work effectively those (individual agency data layers) would be invisibly linked to the GIS system, so that when you were retrieving data from GIS you would think that it was all residing in that one place,” Taylor said.
A meeting of the NSSI science technical group in 2006 also made recommendations for including remote sensing data in the GIS system. And Taylor thinks that GIS data about the artesian water under the North Slope would also be of considerable practical value — hitting pressurized artesian water when, for example, placing pipeline support members could wreak havoc with a project, he said.
NSSI is also investigating the inclusion of the North Slope residents’ traditional ecological knowledge and cultural data into the GIS data sets. Traditional and local knowledge forms part of the required environmental analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act but this information is difficult to collect as part of a scientific study, Taylor said.
Continuing role
By providing access to comprehensive research information Taylor sees initiatives such as the projects database and the GIS system bringing significant benefit to people doing North Slope environmental assessments and other studies. And the availability of good information should feed through to better research and analysis.
“This information should help provide some of the answers and hopefully will result in better decisions,” Taylor said.
Taylor also sees the importance of the NSSI facilitating role.
“I think the role of NSSI is really … to help facilitate various issues by bringing people together from the different agencies, industry or academia that are knowledgeable,” Taylor said. “… There’s so much to be gained by looking past your front door to see what your neighbor’s doing.”
