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BLM seeks comments on NPR-A mitigation Agency has proposed a regional strategy for mitigating impacts of oil and gas activities on communities in northeastern NPR-A ALAN BAILEY Petroleum News
The federal Bureau of Land Management has published a draft regional mitigation strategy for mitigating the impacts of oil and gas activities in the northeastern National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The strategy addresses impacts on the local Inupiat people, including the ecosystem on which the people depend and the Native culture. The 90-day public comment period for the document began on Sept. 30.
Regional scale planning The development of the regional mitigation strategy emanates from the work conducted to improve mitigation policies and practices as part of BLM’s record of decision authorizing ConocoPhillips’s Greater Mooses Tooth 1 development in NPR-A. The concept behind issuing a formal regional mitigation strategy is to enable proactive regional scale planning, rather than conducting the planning on a project-by-project basis, the agency says.
BLM’s Integrated Activity Plan for the NPR-A requires community and environmental mitigation measures for development projects - the regional mitigation strategy specifically addresses what is referred to as “compensatory mitigation,” the actions required as compensation for environmental impacts that cannot be avoided or rectified.
“The intent of the RMS is to provide a well-balanced mitigation framework that will increase consistency, predictability, and certainty for future oil and gas development, while providing for environmentally responsible development of resources within the Northeastern NPR-A,” said BLM State Director Bud Cribley. “Once the RMS is finalized, it will be an important step towards ensuring the sustainability of natural resources in the Arctic, including important subsistence wildlife populations.”
“This is a positive step toward ensuring that oil companies profiting from development in the western Arctic will take steps to offset the unavoidable negative impacts of their work,” said Nicole Whittington-Evans, Alaska regional director for the Wilderness Society. “The RMS is essential to ensuring that the Bureau of Land Management adheres to the terms of the Integrated Activity Plan, which strikes a balance between conservation and development.”
Collaborative process BLM says that it is developing the regional strategy through a collaborative process involving representatives from the oil industry; federal and state government agencies; Alaska Native interest groups; North Slope communities; conservation groups; an NPR-A working group; and other stakeholders. Potential mitigation measures may include actions to improve subsistence activities, measures to preserve Inupiat culture and environmental restoration, BLM says.
In compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, the federal government would conduct a separate environmental analysis of any proposed mitigation actions resulting from implementation of the strategy, BLM says.
In practice, any individual oil and gas project in the NPR-A will have impacts that vary, depending on the nature and location of the facilities associated with the project, the new mitigation strategy document says. As a consequence, each project will require its own implementation plan for mitigation measures. However, the regional mitigation strategy will lay the groundwork for these individual plans, enabling plans to be developed and executed quickly under the umbrella of a landscape-level strategy that takes into account the impacts of developments and the long-term trends in the human and natural environments, including the impacts of climate change, the document says.
The strategy document includes a list of 36 example mitigation actions that might be used as compensation for oil and gas development activities. Suggested actions include the development of programs to enhance local food sources for communities in the region; the funding of cultural camps for youth; and the restoration and maintenance of water flow volumes and quality in the Colville River watershed.
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