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Decision time Houle says NPR-A at crossroads: Will feds exclude the most prospective area — the Barrow arch? Will the northwest get 79 stipulations from northeast? Kristen Nelson PNA Editor-in-Chief
Larry Houle of the Alaska Support Industry Alliance believes that the draft environmental impact statement being prepared by the Bureau of Land Management for the northwest planning area of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska represents a crossroads for further oil and gas exploration in the NPR-A.
“There’s an opportunity here to address future exploration in Alaska. And if the stipulations, the 79 stipulations that were applied to the northeast section, encumber the northwest section, oil and gas development in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska will come to a halt,” Houle said.
“Oil and gas exploration and development. …they just won’t exist. You cannot be that restrictive in the northwest, as restrictive as you were in the northeast, you cannot apply that to the northwest and expect to have the explorers maintain their interest in Alaska.”
Houle, general manager of The Alliance and an at-large member since 1999 of BLM’s Alaska Resource Advisory Council, talked to PNA in early May, after a late-April meeting of the council in Fairbanks which included an update on BLM’s work on the draft environmental impact statement for the northwest NPR-A, a planning area of more than 9 million acres where an oil and gas lease sale is planned for 2004.
The draft EIS for the northwest planning area is scheduled to be completed this November, with comments and hearings through Feb. 1. The final EIS is due to be out in September 2003, with a record of decision in October 2003 and a lease sale in June 2004.
Resources should be identified first Houle said he is impressed by BLM’s commitment to keep the northwest NPR-A process on schedule, but said he is concerned that the process seems to be following that taken in the northeast planning area, a process that resulted in the most prospective oil and gas areas along the Barrow Arch being excluded from the sale because of conservation concerns.
“You just need to consider the fact that it is a petroleum reserve first and foremost and see if we can responsibly lease those acres out to those companies that are willing to invest in Alaska,” Houle said.
“And apparently the most prospective areas lie along the Barrow arch. And that’s why those tracts between Point Barrow and Teshekpuk Lake — we need to look at those. Where are the resources? In the northeast planning area, where a lease sale was held in 1999 and another is scheduled for this June, the Barrow Arch was excluded from leasing, a result which Houle attributed to identifying areas of conservation concern first, irrespective of hydrocarbon potential.
Houle sees the same thing happening in the northwest:
“It seems to me that planners are beginning to identify conservation or special use areas first, without regard for oil and gas resources,” Houle said.
At the Alaska Resource Advisory Council meeting in April, he said it appeared “that we’re taking a look at those special use areas first, without understanding what kind of gas and oil plays are underneath the surface.
“This is the same process that was taken by Secretary (of the Interior) Babbitt when they did the northeast section of NPR-A. And that resulted in large areas where exploration and development were restricted for no reason other than conservation qualities.”
What happened in the northeast area of NPR-A, Houle said, is that the most prospective areas were removed from leasing, closing all access to reserves.
“And we need to keep in mind that it is a National Petroleum Reserve first and foremost,” he said.
Northeast stipulations could be basis for northwest Houle said he also sees a problem developing around stipulations for the northwest NPR-A planning area: the very real possibility that the 79 stipulations put in place for the northeast area will be adopted for the northwest area.
“Many of them were new and they were not supported by science. They were kind of what I’ll call feel-good stipulations,” Houle said.
“What we don’t want to have happen is we don’t want the planners that are working on the northwest plan to begin the whole process for northwest by rolling these 79 stipulations over and just saying, well, they worked in northeast, and therefore they should work in northwest. That’s very important to avoid that.”
Houle said he is also concerned that proponents of the stipulations will call for more study.
“Well, I don’t want to study things forever.” There is enough scientific data, he said, and more study “would delay this 2004 lease sale. … you can suffer paralysis from analysis — and you want to avoid that.” Site-specific stipulations “I guess what makes sense to the Alliance is that all the planning area, basically, from the very beginning be considered to be open for oil and gas leasing,” Houle said.
Explorers should identify areas with the best potential for oil and gas.
Then stipulations “need to be looked at on a site-specific basis” and applied to smaller areas instead of just having “a blanket effect.”
In addition to applying stipulations to smaller ecosystems within the planning area, Houle said the Alliance believes it is important that offshore lease areas have uplands available, “so you can actually drill from the uplands and reach into the offshore leasing area.”
The Alliance would also like to see planners include “transportation corridors or site pads that would accommodate multiple use.” In addition to providing staging and storage for oil and gas exploration, Houle said, agencies could use permanent pads for studies.
No restrictions on permanent facilities Houle said he hoped that the northwest EIS “will not include restrictions on permanent oil and gas facilities in the areas that are open for leasing.” There were several areas in the northeast, he said, where no permanent facilities are allowed.
“If there are sensitive regions, that need protection, this is the site-specific issue, they are better addressed in site-specific NEPA analysis for projects proposed within those areas,” he said.
Houle also said that because of the distances from infrastructure in the northwest NPR-A, “summer stacking of drilling rigs and associated equipment on insulated ice pads needs to be recognized as a viable option.”
Because only winter exploratory drilling is allowed, and because of the distances, the option of storing equipment over the summer needs to be part of the northwest plan, he said.
“You need to stack. We need to look at the option of actually stacking drill rigs and that type of equipment, extra fuels and things like that, during the summer months just to expedite that winter operation. And I’m hoping that BLM will also facilitate construction of permanent gravel staging areas or airstrips in strategic areas of the northwest section. It is so remote. It is such a harsh climate, that if we actually were able to stake out certain staging areas, with airstrips, in strategic locations, it would do nothing but facilitate with minimal impact to the area, the staging for winter time operations.”
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