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MMS waiting on state Beaufort Sea sale OCS Beaufort Sea sale 176 area identification won't occur until agency sees results of state sale in November Kristen Nelson PNA News Editor
The Alaska Outer Continental Shelf Region of the U.S. Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service is taking a cautious approach to the upcoming federal outer continental shelf Beaufort Sea oil and gas lease sale — and to the draft environmental impact statement for BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc.'s Liberty project, the first Beaufort Sea development completely on federal leases.
John Goll, the agency's Alaska regional manager, told PNA June 9 that the area identification for sale 176 and the draft EIS for Liberty are tied up with and have been slowed down by other things that have gone on in the last year.
Because of uncertainties caused by BP Amoco's acquisition of ARCO, the state's 1999 Beaufort Sea areawide sale was put on hold.
MMS, Goll said, had planned to benefit from results of the state's sale in its own area identification — establishing the area to be studied in the EIS for sale 176. “So I think we did something similar to the state, just wanting to slow it down a little bit,” he said.
Also, there were widely divergent views on the area that should be included in the sale at a Beaufort Sea sale advisory meeting MMS held in January. “And that was part of what the department was wrestling with,” Goll said. The agency never intended for the sale to stretch from the Canadian border to Barrow, he said. The preliminary view, he said, was that it would be bigger than the last federal Beaufort Sea sale, but not cover the whole area.
“It was what area in between should we really concentrate on? So that's part of where knowing what gets leased in a state sale would be helpful,” Goll said.
The area identification identifies the area MMS would “look at in an environmental impact statement, which is not necessarily what you end up with in the end,” he said.
New five-year plan The earliest a sale would now occur, he said, is in 2002, because there is about a year and a half of work remaining to be done. The present five-year plan expires in June 2002 and if sale 176 takes place later than June 2002, it would fall into the agency's next five-year program.
What could happen, Goll said, is that preliminary work would be done prior to June 2002 and the sale would actually be part of the next five-year plan.
The year and a half process of planning for the agency's next five-year round of oil and gas lease sales will start around November of this year, beginning with a request for comment on areas of interest, he said.
MMS lead on Liberty The other project which is going a little slower than planned is the EIS for BP Exploration (Alaska)'s Liberty project. MMS is the lead agency on the EIS, and Goll said that one reason the Liberty EIS is going slowly is that the Northstar EIS, with the Corps of Engineers as the lead agency, didn't go as smoothly as everybody would have liked.
Onshore leasing and development has been going on for more than 20 years, Goll said: “It took time for people to gain confidence in what was happening onshore and it's probably going to take some time, again, for that confidence to be built offshore.”
He said that the pioneers have the toughest time. “We saw some of that with Northstar. We're getting some of that with Liberty. And what we're trying to do with the EIS is deal with as many of these issues up front, rather than have them wait until the last minute — that appeared to happen with Northstar.”
One thing MMS has been doing is holding extra meetings with some agencies, like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Environmental Protection Agency, to make sure that the information those agencies want is included.
“What we want to really try to do on this EIS is to key in on what the real issues are,” Goll said. Sometimes, he said, the issues get lost in an EIS because of the volume of information it contains.
“There were a number of issues that people said well, the next one we just have to handle these things differently” ... and “some issues that people wanted us to take a much closer look at.”
Type of pipe an issue One of those issues is the kind of pipe, and Goll said that both MMS and BP have contracted for studies, one of which is still incomplete, which will be a strong part of the EIS. BP funded a study to look at different types of pipe designs, among them single-walled, pipe within a pipe and steel-wrapped pipe. MMS funded an independent study to look at the four designs and another study to make an estimate of the failure factor of each type of design.
A fourth contract was a more generic review of pipe and pipe designs.
Type of pipe has been one of the key issues of concern, Goll said. “It would be very easy for us to have gone ahead and said, pipe in pipe, let's just go down that route and do it.
“But we have to make sure that that is really the right answer.”
It sounds good from a gut reaction, Goll said, “but you've got to make sure that it's not going to cause more problems because it's a more complicated design than a single pipe.”
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