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North Slope Borough takes another swipe at NPR-A plans Producer association tells agency it supports performance-based stipulations; says no new environmental concerns raised in objections to final EIS Kristen Nelson Petroleum News Editor-in-Chief
The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management issued its final environmental impact statement for amendments to the northeast National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska plan Jan. 28, triggering a 30-day review period before the agency can issue a record of decision. BLM’s final preferred alternative defers Teshekpuk Lake from oil and gas leasing; adds three new stipulations to protect caribou calving, movement and insect relief areas and the goose molting area north of Teshekpuk Lake; and opens the area north of the lake for leasing in seven large tracts (46,000 acres to 59,000 acres) with surface occupancy restrictions and a limit of 300 acres per tract of surface disturbance.
Protective measures include: all water intake structures in fish-bearing or non-fish-bearing waters would be designed, operated and maintained to prevent fish entrapment, entrainment or injury; the subsistence consultation buffer has been expanded to include the entire northeast NPR-A, not just portions of several buffers along various rivers as was the case in the original 1998 northeast decision; minimum height of new pipelines will be seven feet; the Tingmiaksiqvik River has been added to the list of rivers with set-backs that provide additional fish protection; coastal area activities require consultation with the Nuiqsut Whaling Captains Association, Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, the Barrow Whaling Captains Association and North Slope Borough to minimize impacts to subsistence whaling activities; a caribou movement corridor will be established to minimize disturbance and hindrance of caribou or alteration of caribou movements; and a southern caribou calving area will be established to limit disturbance and hindrance of caribou.
Details are available on the Web: http://aurora.ak.blm.gov/npra/ Formal objections from borough North Slope Borough Mayor George Ahmaogak said Feb. 25 that the borough had lodged formal complaints in a 29-page letter to Interior Secretary Gale Norton, asking the secretary to reject BLM’s leasing plan.
“Don’t get me wrong — we support leasing and development in NPR-A, as long as it responds to the biggest concerns of local stakeholders. Those concerns have to do with protection of wildlife and access for subsistence,” Ahmaogak said in a statement. The borough said in its letter to Norton that the EIS is deficient in many critical respects. “The document simply does not do the job of recognizing and fully analyzing the issues most critical to affected stakeholders, and especially to the most directly affected stakeholders, the Inupiat of the North Slope.”
The borough said the amended document “was developed with some opportunity for stakeholder input, but without real meaningful consultation. We have participated in meetings with BLM staff and had the opportunity to submit scoping comments and comments on the Draft, but we see little of our position reflected in the final Preferred Alternative.”
The borough said the preferred alternative “is radically different than anything presented in the Draft, and was never discussed with us except for a short briefing conducted after the Final had been sent to the printer. Key components of it were never presented for comment in the Draft.”
The borough asks the secretary to select the “no action” alternative, rather than BLM’s preferred alternative, and told the secretary amendments to the 1998 decision “should not be considered before the completion of a comprehensive research program for the Planning Area.” Support from AOGA Judy Brady, executive director of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, told BLM in a Feb. 28 letter that AOGA supports BLM’s preferred alternative, and said the industry’s environmental record on the North Slope “provides the solid foundation and basis for supporting continued development in NPR-A.” Objections to BLM’s proposal “have already been answered by the scientific and environmental record of oil and gas operations on Alaska’s North Slope. All of the environmental concerns that have been raised in the letters of objection have already been responded to — and successfully responded to — in actual practice.”
She also noted that “oil and gas operations in Alaska’s Arctic are uniquely regulated and will continue to be uniquely regulated” under performance-based stipulations and required operating procedures in BLM’s final EIS.
Concerns presented to the agency are not new or special to the NPR-A northeast planning area, Brady said, but “the fact of the matter is that each of the concerns expressed have been raised, often by the same parties, in an attempt to prevent past state and federal sales in other areas of the North Slope and even in Cook Inlet in the southern coast of Alaska. The concerns expressed for future development in the Northwest NPR-A, particularly in waterfowl nesting areas, do not raise any issues that have not already been successfully addressed in actual oil and gas operations.”
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