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THE EXPLORERS 2006 - MMS issues draft EIS for Chukchi Agency says only feasible way to export gas from Chukchi Sea is via onshore North Slope pipeline Alan Bailey Petroleum News
In October 2006 the U.S. Minerals Management Service issued a draft environmental impact statement for a proposed Chukchi Sea lease sale in November 2007, as part of the MMS 2007 to 2012 five-year outer continental shelf leasing program. The proposed sale would include 6,156 whole or partial blocks covering about 34 million acres. Excluded from the sale is a 15- to 10-mile coastal corridor, known as the polynya or spring lead.
Fred King, chief of the MMS leasing activities section, told Petroleum News Oct. 16 that the draft EIS was part of an environmental analysis under the terms of the National Environmental Policy Act and is not a decision document.
“We evaluate our proposal which comes out of a five-year plan,” King said. “… This NEPA document is looking at what would happen if we had a sale in the Chukchi Sea.”
In assessing the possible environmental impacts of industrial activities beyond initial seismic surveys the agency assumed that exploration of oil and gas leases in the Chukchi would involve the drilling of seven to 14 exploration wells followed by the development of an initial 1 billion barrel oil field. It would not be economic to develop an initial field smaller than that in the remote Chukchi region, the agency said.
Four alternatives MMS looked at four possible alternatives in response to the proposed lease sale. The first alternative is to proceed with the lease sale as proposed, while the second alternative is to defer the sale. The third and fourth alternatives involve deferring the lease sale in a corridor along the coastal side of the lease area — in effect, widening the polynya zone that is already excluded from the sale. Alternative three involves a 60-mile wide deferral zone, while alternative four involves a 25-mile wide deferral zone.
And in assessing the environmental impacts for the alternatives, MMS considered the effects both of routine industrial activities and of a large oil spill. Routine activities would include operations such as drilling wells, building oil facilities and operating oil production.
King emphasized that MMS would impose a set of standard mitigation measures on oil and gas activities, and that these measures would minimize any environmental impacts.
“I do not believe we are identifying any significant effects that would happen from our routine operations,” King said.
A large oil spill would, however, have significant effects. MMS estimated a probability of 33 to 51 percent of a large oil spill occurring during the entire life of that 1 billion barrel oil field. But the draft EIS concluded that wide-scale adverse impacts from an oil spill are unlikely.
“While a large oil spill could cause some adverse effects and a number of potentially significant effects, we do not expect these effects to occur, because it is unlikely that a large oil spill would occur,” the draft EIS says. “Furthermore, an area affected by such a spill relative to the size of the Chukchi Sea decreases the likelihood that the resources would be widely contacted by the spill.”
The no-action alternative The draft EIS said that the second alternative, in which the Chukchi lease sale would not take place, “would provide some protection to the environmental resources in the Chukchi Sea.” There would be no disturbance to the flora and fauna, and no risk of an oil spill.
But, this alternative would also eliminate the potential economic benefit of Chukchi oil development. Moreover, assuming that current U.S. oil consumption continues at its present level, failure to develop oil resources from the Chukchi would displace oil production and transportation to some other parts of the world and cause adverse environmental impacts in those places.
The draft EIS said that this same line of reasoning applies to any oil not produced in the deferral corridors under the third and fourth alternatives.
For those two alternatives, the draft EIS said that the deferral corridors would reduce some of the environmental impacts of oil and gas development and “provide a measure of protection of the resources in the deferral area.” But the draft EIS concluded “the effects to the resources in the (whole) Chukchi Sea area … would be essentially the same as the effect of alternative one (holding a lease sale for the whole planning area).”
And the implementation of the deferral corridors would significantly reduce the probability of developing an economic oil field.
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