|
DEC reviews environmental commitments from 1999 charter agreement with state BP, Phillips online with extra-regulatory work companies committed to when ARCO Alaska purchased
By Kristen Nelson PNA Editor-in-Chief
BP and Phillips are meeting commitments the companies made for extra-regulatory environmental work as a part of the 1999 charter agreement with the state, Commissioner Michele Brown of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation said March 28 when DEC released its first report on the commitments.
Environmental commitments included: an average of $200,000 a year for 10 years on Arctic spill response research and development projects agreed to by DEC; acceleration of the transition to double-hulled tankers beyond requirements of Oil Pollution Act of 1990; up to $500,000 per year for state to retain expertise on corrosion monitoring and related practices; BP to spend $10 million through 2007 to clean up 14 North Slope abandoned sides; BP and Phillips to collect and dispose of abandoned empty barrels found on the North Slope; accelerated cleanup of approximately 41 North Slope sites for which the companies are responsible.
Brown said the environmental pledges in the charter “are unprecedented. Never before has the resolution of antitrust concerns in a commercial merger of this scale included environmental terms.”
Ross Klie, business unit leader for health, safety and environment for BP in Alaska said that BP recognized when it signed the charter, “that our actions would be judged and those actions need to be squared with the promises that we made in signing the charger.”
Orders have been placed for three state-of-the-art double-hulled tankers, he said, the first to be delivered in 2003. BP is working with the state to identify the abandoned sites for cleanup over the next 5 years, “these are sites we didn’t create and are not responsible for, but we’ve taken responsibility through the charter,” Klie said.
Ken Donajkowski, manager of health, environment, safety and training for Phillips Alaska, said “Phillips views the charter as an important subset of our commitment to safety and environmental stewardship in the state.”
Orphan sites from 1980s Brown said the orphan abandoned sites were ones where “people either ran out of money and walked away … or they contest their liability. They’re ones that we would have to either litigate to get someone to clean up, or we would have to pay out of state funds.”
Many of these sites are from the early days of oil development, said Susan Harvey, manager of DEC’s industry preparedness and pipeline program, but they vary through time, she said, and range up to the 1980s when many operators went bust “or left the slope without completing their obligations and we don’t have responsible parties.”
Brown said the state did not expect future problems from current activities because “there are commitments in terms of how people do their practices that prevent that kind of contamination. Plus if there is a company that’s viable we go after them directly to do the cleanup.” Accelerating pit cleanup BP’s Klie said most of the sites BP is responsible for “actually are old technology” when reserve pits were used to capture muds and cuttings and drilling waste.
Today, he said, “we take all that material as it comes out of the ground, put it through a ball mill, grind it up into very fine particles and then slurry that in water and re-inject it into injection layers.”
Since reserve pits aren’t being created anymore on the North Slope there are a finite number of old reserve pits up there.
“We’re committed to cleaning them,” Klie said, “so once we get to those, then they should be gone and should be gone forever.”
| 