Sally Jewell makes ANWR stance clear

Interior secretary cites Obama opposition to oil exploration, sticks to controversial funding proposal for ‘legacy well’ cleanup

Wesley Loy

For Petroleum News

In case anyone is still unsure where the Obama administration stands on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, please refer to newly installed Interior Secretary Sally Jewell’s recent congressional testimony.

“The president has made it clear that it is not part of his agenda to do oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and I support that position,” she said.

Jewell made the statement under questioning from U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, during a June 6 hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Murkowski is the committee’s top-ranking minority member.

The secretary’s testimony comes as an Interior agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, prepares to finalize a new management plan for ANWR.

To the dismay of Murkowski and other Alaska elected officials, the draft version of that plan didn’t include an alternative for allowing oil and gas exploration on ANWR’s highly prospective coastal plain.

The draft, however, did include options to convert the coastal plain to wilderness, which effectively would ban exploration permanently in the area.

Murkowski, during the hearing, said it seemed inconsistent to include wilderness alternatives and not an oil and gas alternative, because an affirmative act of Congress would be required either way.

The senator cited federal regulations she said require the Interior Department to analyze all reasonable alternatives, and she urged Jewell to take another look at the ANWR management plan before releasing the final version.

Legacy well cleanup

The legacy wells are dozens of test wells the U.S. Geological Survey and the Navy drilled between 1944 and 1982 in or near what today is called the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Another Interior agency, the Bureau of Land Management, shepherds the vast NPR-A.

Murkowski and other state officials say the federal government has neglected the legacy sites, where some wells remain unplugged and surface areas are junk-strewn and potentially contaminated.

Murkowski and the others have been pushing BLM to clean up the legacy wells, and are upset that the president’s 2014 budget proposal included language that would divert the state’s share of NPR-A oil and gas revenue to pay for legacy well cleanup.

The senator says that’s unacceptable, that it falls solely on the federal government to clean up those wells.

“Is it your opinion that the state of Alaska should be held financially responsible for the federal government’s responsibility to remediate these wells?” Murkowski asked Jewell.

“I completely agree that the legacy wells are a problem that we need to solve,” Jewell replied. “They do need to be cleaned up.”

But Jewell said the USGS and Navy drilling was “one of the reasons we have a sense of the resource potential” in the NPR-A.

She noted that BLM recently released a legacy well assessment and priority list for cleaning up the worst of them.

“We do need money to be able to do that,” Jewell said. “And, you know, I would like to think that as the resource was assessed in part through the use of these wells, that the revenue from the resource — state and federal — be used to help in the cleanup. I think that it is a revenue generator, it puts oil in the pipeline. We need to work on figuring out how to pay for it. Because right now, there isn’t sufficient money.”

“I would agree that we have some very difficult budget limitations. We all know that,” Murkowski responded.

“I want to work with you on a path,” she told Jewell. “But if that path is going to mean that monies that would be going to the state of Alaska and the residents of the North Slope are going to be choked back, that’s not appropriate.”