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Joint Pipeline Office ties up six renewals, one new ROW permit State, federal officials will sign off on trans-Alaska pipeline, five North Slope pipeline renewals, and new Kenai-Kachemak gasline on Nov. 26 Kristen Nelson PNA Editor-in-Chief
The Joint Pipeline Office may not produce a tangible product, but its work is as schedule-driven as any brick and mortar project. Gov. Tony Knowles will preside Nov. 26 at Anchorage signings of JPO’s current products — six pipeline renewals including the trans-Alaska pipeline and a new right of way lease.
State Pipeline Coordinator John Kerrigan told PNA Nov. 15 that in addition to the 30-year renewal for the trans-Alaska pipeline, 30-year renewals will also be signed for five North Slope pipelines: Kuparuk, Kuparuk extension, Oliktok, Milne and Endicott. “They’ve all gone through the same public process,” Kerrigan said, “they’ve all gone through the same monitoring process, they’ve all gone through the same compliance review process as TAPS did.”
The trans-Alaska pipeline renewal, Kerrigan said, will give industry 30 years of stability: “knowing that they have a transportation system for all of their exploration and development throughout the state.”
The state will also sign the Kenai-Kachemak gasline right of way permit with Marathon Oil Co. and Unocal Alaska Nov. 26.
Handled like construction The renewals and permit were produced to an internal schedule — well ahead of the time expected for such approvals.
Kerrigan said the new right of way for the Kenai-Kachemak gas pipeline would normally have been an 18-month process, but “with as broad a spectrum of public participation as possible, we completed it in eight months.”
And the trans-Alaska pipeline renewal is a year to a year and a half ahead, he said.
Kerrigan said these results were possible because the Joint Pipeline Office — seven state and six federal agencies — has figured out the process.
“We plan each and every project and permit just like it is a construction project,” Kerrigan said. “We have flow charts. We have task-oriented schedules with deliverables. We have overlapping overlays of the federal and state permitting process. And we have each permit deliverable laid out according to the jurisdiction.
“So when we build a permit, it’s just like we build a project, for each and every major permit we take on out of this office.”
Kerrigan credited the permitting and renewal work to the team of people at JPO, the state and federal liaisons and the Department of Natural Resources and Bureau of Land Management employees within the office.
BLM looking at process The Joint Pipeline Office was established in 1990 and includes state and federal agencies with similar regulatory or management responsibilities for common carrier pipelines in Alaska. The most significant of these is the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
It is a different way for state and federal agencies to do business.
Kerrigan said he didn’t know of any other model which brings together so many state and federal agencies and so many overlapping jurisdictions “and allows them to be accountable for delivering their product within the framework of a project permit — whether it’s an EIS or a right of way lease.”
JPO was recently invited to give seminars to BLM in the Lower 48 on the synergism of the JPO. BLM, Kerrigan said, wanted to hear more about “how JPO was set up, why it works, would something like this work in the Lower 48, maybe would something like this work additionally up here in different arenas — mining, timber, fishing…”
Process born in the late 1970s Jerry Brossia, U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management federal authorized officer at JPO, the head federal official (formerly the state pipeline coordinator, the state’s lead official) told PNA that the JPO process has a long history. It grew, he said, out of a lessons-learned conference held in the late 1970s — after the completion of the trans-Alaska pipeline. Agencies looked for lessons learned in pipeline construction, he said, and concluded that “you needed to have a single agency in charge so that you could establish a uniform process and work programs and schedules and work toward it — and it would be an inclusive concept rather than exclusive… archaeological considerations as well as environmental,” engineering as well as safety.
With a gas pipeline from Alaska to the Lower 48 then in the works, President Carter took the idea and created the a single federal office to manage that project. The gas pipeline effort died, Brossia said, so the joint office didn’t go anywhere for oil and gas at that time.
The tri-agency mining application But in the late 1970s the state was trying to resurrect the placer mining industry. Brossia and BLM’s John Santora (federal point of contact for establishment of JPO in 1990 and later federal authorized officer) looked at what could be done jointly to permit placer mining. There was a brainstorming session, Brossia said, and “we decided that to permit these miners what we needed was to figure out all the agencies involved” — some 10 to 12 major agencies. They looked at the requirements the different agencies had and lumped them into several categories.
“And then we went to all these agencies and we got their forms and requirements” and found the agencies were asking the same questions, and miners were required to fill out multiple forms.
The tri-agency mining application — actually used by about a dozen agencies — was the result, he said, along with where the application would be turned in and how it would be handed around to the different agencies. There was even a shared inspection program.
“So we started to create a process: one window where you turned it in and one application form, one inspection group, etc. and uniform standards for what we were going to require of the placer miners.”
Overlays of basins, mining districts They also discovered that they could overlay Clean Water Act basins with the mining districts established under the 1872 federal mining law, borrow some of what Canada was doing to code streams by their significance for fish, ranging from streams with no fish to rearing and spawning streams.
When miners submitted applications, the mine was identified by location, tying in water issues, and a computer generated permit went back to the miner with all of the requirements.
Brossia said that he and Santora didn’t try to reinvent the wheel, “but to always use existing law. Because whenever you try to change the law you’re always interfering with some agency’s long-established policies and procedures and the politics of changing laws.
“So we just would figure out the maze. And then we would figure out the rabbit trail through the maze.”
Planning, scheduling essential Planning and a project schedule are essential to JPO’s operation, Brossia said.
Each agency has something different to produce for a project, he said, and “there are dozens of these little steps you have to go through and what we’ve always found is good pre-planning in identifying all the players and all the processes and all the tasks and then pre-consultation with them and then establishing the project schedule and project manager and just working through it — rather than trying to reinvent it.”
Brossia said working through the process very systematically is important.
“We don’t reinvent the process,” he said, but just work through it.
“And we produce a lot of visual flow charts and project management plans. So everybody knows their role and knows the schedule and knows what they have to do.”
The process involves “flow charting, overlaying jurisdictions, making sure that our schedule has specific tasks and deliverables for those tasks. ... And at the end of the day it comes together. It’s millions of man hours, but it comes together,” Kerrigan said.
There is a lot of discussion involved, he said, and tough issues have to be worked through.
“But when you go out and build a skyscraper you have lots of issues that you have to work through before you have that product. The difference is, you can see that product: it’s tangible. Our product is intangible, but it’s just as important,” Kerrigan said.
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