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Parnell’s elevation request rejected Corps of Engineers, Obama administration officials hear from North Slope officials, communities on rejection of permit for CD-5 Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The district commander for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska has denied a request from Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell to elevate the Corps’ rejection of ConocoPhillips Alaska’s CD-5 Alpine satellite permit application.
Col. Reinhard Koenig told Parnell in a March 12 letter that communications from the state do not meet federal regulatory requirements necessary for the decision to be forwarded to the division engineer for resolution.
Those regulations, quoted by the governor in his request for elevation of the decision, require district engineers to refer a decision to issue to deny permits to the division engineer for resolution when “the recommended decision is contrary to the written position of the Governor of the state in which the work would be performed.”
The state’s July 10, 2009, statement in support of the permit was not from then-Gov. Sarah Palin, but from Commissioner of Natural Resources Tom Irwin, signed by Deputy Commissioner Marty Rutherford.
ConocoPhillips appealing Koenig told Parnell that the regulations provide specific appeals rights for ConocoPhillips Alaska, which can appeal the decision through the division engineer under the administrative appeal process.
ConocoPhillips Alaska “has taken steps to exercise its appeal rights,” Koenig said.
He told Parnell that the company asked to review the Corps’ administrative record, a request Koenig said the Corps “promptly granted.”
Following that review, he said, ConocoPhillips requested a full copy of the record; Koenig said the Corps was finalizing the legal review required before release of the record and said ConocoPhillips would have the record “this week.”
North Slope letters Letters objecting to the Corps’ denial of the permit for CD-5 and the Nigliq channel bridge were addressed to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar from Mayor Edward Itta of the North Slope Borough; to Salazar, Administrator Lisa Jackson of the Environmental Protection Agency and Assistant Secretary Jo-Ellen Darcy of the U.S. Army by Roberta Quintavell, president and CEO of the Arctic Slope Regional Corp., Isaac Nukapigak, president of Kuukpik Corp., Bernice Kaigelak of the Native Village of Nuiqsut and Thomas Napageak Jr., mayor of the City of Nuiqsut.
Itta told Salazar that the North Slope Borough “recognizes that the Colville River delta is a biologically productive river system” and said Title 19 of the NSB Code of Ordinances places a high priority on protecting the subsistence lifestyle, culture and natural resources of NSB residents.
That, the mayor said, “is one of the reasons why the NSB was frustrated” with the Corps’ denial of ConocoPhillips Alaska’s application for a Section 404 permit for CD-5.
The ASRC letter called the Corps’ decision “troublesome in three major areas”: for ignoring broad support for the project throughout Alaska; because the decision “will have a material impact on our communities and people because this decision is counter to the intent of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act”; and because the Corps has “neglected the technical risk and environmental liability of a three-phase fluid in a Horizontal Directional Drilling … conveyed pipeline.”
“ASRC is addressing you as a landowner established pursuant to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act,” Quintavell said in the ASRC letter. The CD-5 expansion represents development of Native-owned lands which “serve as a significant economic engine” for all Alaska Native corporations.
The CD-5 development “has the potential to step outside the Colville River delta to Native lands, and eventually into NPR-A,” she said. “However, as a result of the USCOE decision, we are caught in the paradoxical situation of being unable to leave the delta in the name of saving the delta itself.”
HDD, horizontal directional drilling, “is not a practicable alternative” for the Nigliq Channel because three-phase fluids (water, oil and natural gas) are more corrosive than the processed (sales quality) oil carried under the Colville River from the Alpine field, she said.
Because of the depth and angle of the HDD line proposed under the Nigliq Channel “there is no known way to monitor corrosion or other problems with the underground portion of the line,” Quintavell said. “We must question why any agency would prefer a system that cannot be monitored effectively over surface facilities, through a bridge-pipeline and road, which all parties can monitor on a regular basis.”
She said ASRC urges the Corps to reconsider the CD-5 proposal “and evaluate the true benefits of the CD-5 development on the Native community of the North Slope and statewide further.”
Nuiqsut: impact of agency changes The letter from Kuukpik Corp., the Native Village of Nuiqsut and the City of Nuiqsut, “the tribal, municipal and economic/landowning entities representing the community that will be most impacted by development” at CD-5, asked that the Corps “take a fresh look at the merits of the application” for the Section 404 permit.
“The circumstances here call for a fresh look at CPAI’s application, rather than the deferential review standard of appeal,” the letter said. The ConocoPhillips Alaska project reflects “a compromise reached after years of controversy, dating back to 2003 when CD-5 was first proposed.”
The Nuiqsut organizations “vehemently opposed” ConocoPhillips’ first proposed bridge location, but in 2007, the organizations said, the Corps “strongly encouraged compromise discussions by announcing that it was likely to find” a pipeline-only bridge at a location to which Nuiqsut objected to be the least environmentally damaging practicable alternative.
In late 2008, negotiations reached a compromise — a bridge across the Nigliq Channel near the existing CD-4 drilling pad.
“It is that permit application, for the long-sought and hard-won mutually agreeable compromise design, that the Corps has just denied,” the Nuiqsut letter said.
The “only apparent change” since the Corps pushed Nuiqsut and ConocoPhillips to negotiate in 2007 “is that an internal Corps reorganization in the summer of 2009 resulted in a new Project Manager for the application, a new supervisor for that Project Manager, a new supervisor for that supervisor and a new Colonel in charge of the Alaska District.”
“In the space of a month or so, the individuals holding the four positions most involved in a review process that had been ongoing for five years, through an Environmental Impact Statement and three separate Section 404 applications, were replaced,” the Nuiqsut letter said.
“This is a stunning loss of institutional knowledge, especially since none of the replacements had any significant experience with Arctic oil industry-related projects, or with projects where subsistence impacts or Native sociocultural impacts were a significant part of the analysis.”
While the change in personnel may not have been a factor in the Corps’ decision, “the level of candor of the discussions that we had with Corps personnel dropped precipitously with the current personnel over what had prevailed with the several prior Project Managers and their supervisors. Rather, and significantly, it was very apparent that the new personnel gave less weight to impacts on the community of Nuiqsut than any of their predecessors had,” the Nuiqsut letter said.
The Nuiqsut letter asks that “the application be referred to a higher authority, preferably in Washington, D.C., but alternatively in the Pacific Division for resolution of CPAI’s application.”
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