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Senate looks at removing petition process from ACMP Unlike House Bill 439, Senate Bill 308 also provides for phased permitting for natural gas pipeline project from North Slope to Canada Kristen Nelson PNA Editor-in-Chief
The Alaska Senate, like the House, is considering a bill removing the right of individuals to petition the Coastal Policy Council over consistency determinations for specific projects. Senate Bill 308, sponsored by Sen. Gene Therriault, R-Fairbanks, also provides that coastal resource districts may not incorporate by reference statutes and administrative regulations adopted by state agencies and provides for phased consistency determination of an Alaska Highway gas pipeline project.
Therriault told Senate Resources March 4 that the bill deals with three issues: The section which prohibits coastal districts from incorporating by reference of statutes and regulations “is actually the way the coastal zone system is working now,” he said, so that is just being put in statute.
The bill also proposes that permitting for an Alaska natural gas pipeline be phased. The project is so large, Therriault said, that permitting in its entirety would not be possible.
The bill also, like House Bill 308, eliminates the petition process by an individual to the Coastal Policy Council.
Pat Galvin, director of the Division of Governmental Coordination, responsible for the implementation of the Alaska Coastal Management Program, said DGC does not oppose the elimination of the petition on individual projects. That petition process does not look at the complete decision, he said, but only at whether comments were fairly considered. Phasing would support gas pipeline Galvin said DGC also supports the phasing proposed in the bill for a natural gas pipeline project from Alaska’s North Slope along the trans-Alaska oil pipeline and into Canada.
The phasing law in place now was adopted in 1994 and was directed at oil and gas lease sale issues, he said, “so that we could have the lease sale phase separate from the exploration phase separate from the development phase.” The legislation was designed for lease sales and doesn’t really fit any other type of project, Galvin said.
Looking at a North Slope natural gas pipeline project, and the scale of such a project, “what we recognized is that it was going to demand such a large amount of information that … the company or the proponent of the project would likely not have the resources to develop all that information up front,” he said. And under the coastal management program, “until you can get your consistency determination, you can’t get any permits for the project.”
And even if the companies could get the resources to generate the amount of information needed for the entire project, it would be too massive for state agencies to review it and comprehend it in the timeframes provide.
And even if the state agencies could deal with it, “the public wouldn’t have the ability to be involved in the process because of the magnitude of the information.” Gas project unique So it has been recognized that it would be beneficial to be able to phase a gas pipeline project. And the approach taken in this bill is probably the best approach, Galvin said: it says a gas pipeline from the North Slope to market is unique and has to be treated differently. It’s the unprecedented size of this project, he said, that makes phasing appropriate. Galvin said DGC would like to see findings included in the bill specifying that this phasing is appropriate because of the unique size of the project.
Committee Chairman John Torgerson said he didn’t see a reason for findings on the project size, but noted that Galvin had made that concern for the record.
John Shively, representing the Alaska Northwest Natural Gas Transportation Co., said the company supports the phasing aspect of the bill.
“This is a very complicated project,” Shively said. “Ordinarily, before you could get a consistency determination you’d have to have every single permit in front of government and approved. We don’t believe that makes sense and so we support this language.”
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