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Vol. 24, No.33 Week of August 18, 2019
Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada's oil and gas industry

ANWR FEIS in a couple of months, NPR-A draft plan out in October

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Tim Bradner

for Petroleum News

It appears there will be no new seismic work in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain done before a planned federal lease sale later this year.

Chad Padgett, BLM’s Alaska area manager, said his agency has proposals for both ground-based and airborne geophysical surveys in ANWR’s coastal plain but that no action can be taken until the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service completes a review of how the activities would affect polar bears in the area, which are threatened.

The agency has also received no new information from the companies proposing the work, Padgett said Aug. 13, in a briefing on BLM’s Alaska activities.

That won’t affect the overall timing for the lease sale, however.

The final environmental impact statement for the coastal plain sale is expected to be published “in next couple of months,” Padgett said, which would allow the record of decision to be issued within 30 days and signed. That would allow time for the lease sale, most likely in December. Lawsuits are expected to be filed by conservation groups that could delay the sale, however.

Lack of new seismic

Lack of access to new seismic is not necessarily a disadvantage for the Interior Department in having a successful sale, however. Roger Herrera is a retired BP geologist familiar with ANWR. It’s sometimes better for companies to go into a lease sale almost blind to new data so that every bidder is on equal footing, Herrera said in a past interview. “If only a few companies have access to the data it can create a feeling of an ‘insider’ group among bidders, which can discourage companies who don’t have access to the information,” he said.

There’s also the chance that the results of the new seismic could downgrade the prospectivity of an area, he said.

Lack of access to new seismic means companies bidding in the ANWR lease sale will have only data from a 1980s-era “group shoot” sponsored by several companies that was done with two-dimensional seismic using technology now considered obsolete. Two companies - BP and Chevron - also drilled an exploration well in the early 1980s in an enclave in the refuge that is privately owned by the nearby Inupiat village of Kaktovik. Results of the well, KIC No. 1, continue to be held confidential.

DEIS for NPR-A

Meanwhile, in another development the Interior Department will publish a draft environmental impact statement in October on changes to its land management plan in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, BLM officials said in the briefing.

The land plan, called the NPR-A Integrated Activity Plan by BLM, will revise an existing plan in 2013 by former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar that greatly expanded areas restricted from leasing and drilling near coastal areas of the petroleum reserve that are considered to have high oil potential by state and federal geologists.

One of the purposes of the revised plan will be to revisit the expanded protected areas set by Salazar and also to revisit the boundaries of coastal areas specified to be off limits in the 1975 Naval Petroleum Reserve Production Act, BLM’s Alaska spokeswoman Lesli Ellis-Wouters said.

“The 1975 act never defined the boundaries of the protected areas,” along the coast, Ellis-Wouters said.

In practice the BLM has withheld areas of sensitive wetlands, such as around Teshekpuk Lake, from leasing or at least from surface entry over the years, but industry and state officials objected to Salazar’s order expanding the protected zone south, away from the coast, into areas of upland tundra not particularly sensitive but which still hold good potential for discoveries.

“The effect of Salazar’s action was to put the best acreage off limit,” said Richard Garrard, an industry exploration geologist familiar with the NPR-A, in past interviews.

A draft EIS is typically followed the final EIS and the record of decision issued within 30 days of the final document. The ROD then allows Interior to publish the revised plan.

While this will be too late to include areas of high potential in an upcoming federal lease sale in the petroleum reserve planned in December the revised plan would allow the acreage to be in a 2020 lease sale. BLM holds lease sales annually in the NPR-A.

- TIM BRADNER

Tim Bradner is copublisher of the Alaska Economic Report and Alaska Legislative Digest



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