|
AOGCC heads into fiscal year with new funding mechanism Four additional positions authorized, commission to share downtown quarters with Regulatory Commission of Alaska Kristen Nelson PNA News Editor
Much changed at the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission as the new fiscal year began July 1. The Legislature authorized a new funding basis for the agency and four additional professional staff and mandated a move into better quarters by next year.
“So what hasn’t changed?”, asked commission Chairman Robert Christenson in a June 14 interview with PNA.
“The same high quality dedication from the commission has not changed,” Christenson said. “We’ll just get better.”
The commission also received needed supplemental funding for the last fiscal year, he said, so that commissioners and professional staff didn’t have to go on leave without pay during June.
The commission regulates how oil and gas is produced in the state, inspects oil and gas field operations and issues drilling permits. Funding change The commission’s budget is approved by the Legislature, and in the past has been based on a fixed charge paid by the oil and gas industry on each barrel of crude oil or equivalent amount of gas produced for sale. With declining production, the old mechanism wasn’t providing adequate funding. This year the Legislature approved a different formula, a changing rate based on the budget approved by the Legislature and then allocated back to oil and gas producers based on volumes.
Christenson said details of the new system were worked out before the Legislation was passed.
“We’re going through and fine tuning it and making sure that everything looks correct … but basically we’re taking the same data that we’ve been collecting and that will be the basis of the assessment of the cost,” he said.
The new system is based on volume produced and injected in a field, divided by the total produced and injected in the state, Christenson said. “And that fraction, times our budget, is the allocation that that particular field is responsible for.”
Water is counted only if reinjected — thus produced water in Cook Inlet, a lot of which still goes into the inlet, is not counted, he said.
The commission generates the bills, which are sent to field operators.
“What we wanted to do, is we wanted to fit into the existing system and the operators already have allocations for a whole lot of things on running the fields that they allocate to the owners,” Christenson said. “So we just send the operators bills and they can allocate this just like they do everything else. So we don’t create a whole new administrative stream.”
Four additional positions funded The commission noted in its 1998 annual report that in 1983 it managed 41 reservoirs in the state and 1,867 wells with 26 employees and a budget of $2.3 million. In 1998, however, the commission managed 70 reservoirs and 3,400 active oil and gas wells with only 19 employees and a budget of $1.6 million. The contrast is greater, the commission noted in the report, if adjusted for inflation.
Commissioner Cammy Oechsli said the four newly funded “positions are all rebuilding what it used to be” and Christenson noted that the positions which will be filled, two senior engineers, a senior geologist and an inspector, “have been needed for a long time. So we’re not creating a new entity here.” The commission’s staff of inspectors had been at five and will return to that level with the addition of the new inspector.
The added positions, he said, will allow the commission to be able to do what it’s supposed to do. Move should happen this year The Legislature mandated that the commission move into the same quarters as the new Regulatory Commission of Alaska, formerly the Alaska Public Utilities Commission, before July 2000. The move is likely to take place this year because the commission’s present office space needs major repairs.
Christenson said that the commission has been contacted for description of its space and is anxious to move before winter because of the condition of the boilers in the agency’s existing building. The heating system in the commission’s offices on Porcupine Street in Mountain View was evaluated in 1996, Christenson said, and was deemed to be “in eminent failure mode.”
Last winter, he said, the controls on one boiler didn’t function at all, “so we turned it on when we wanted heat and opened up the windows when we wanted to cool it off a little bit and turned it off when there was too much heat and closed the windows.” The building also needs a new roof and 30 percent had to have emergency repairs earlier this year because of leaks, Oechsli said. Some synergy between commissions As introduced, the legislation which terminated the APUC and created the Regulatory Commission of Alaska would have merged the AOGCC with the new RCA. That provision was deleted and Legislative Budget and Audit was directed to study whether the two agencies should be merged.
Once the AOGCC has moved into the same building as the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, the agencies will cooperate and see what administrative things can be combined, Christenson said. “Such as sharing record storage space, perhaps admin staff, that sort of thing. So that’s the extent of what we’re going to do when we cohabit for this year. Until the Legislature get through with the study.”
At one point the Legislature considered transferring pipeline matters to the AOGCC and adding a hearing officer to the commission’s staff. In the end, pipeline matters stayed with the RCA, but Christenson said that the legislation which was passed put an additional hearing examiner in the RCA budget with the statement that it would be possible for the AOGCC to use that person if necessary.
The commission has been working on a complete revision of its regulations for several years and the new regulations have been in Juneau since the end of January being reviewed by the state’s regulations attorney, said commissioner David Johnston, who has been involved in the revision since it began.
Johnston said that the attorney is reviewing regulation changes from other departments as well.
“He’s busy,” Johnston said. “He had a series of questions concerning the regulations. We’ve answered those questions for him. And some of his observations were very good, others were just to give him background information to let him appreciate what we were saying… “
Johnston said that what’s going on now is fine tuning. “It’s a special craft to review these things and to catch little nuances…commas and phrasing and that sort of thing…”
“We’ve gotten no negative feedback at all,” Christenson said. “I mean the nature of the comments … are fairly minor…in terms of clarification…”
If there are no substantive changes, the commission won’t have to send them out for public comment again, and they can go to the lieutenant governor’s office for signature.
Johnston said that he doesn’t imaging the regulations will be held up very long once they get to the lieutenant governor’s desk.
“There’s really nothing controversial in the regs because we worked with the industry all the way along,” Christenson said. “So they know the content of it. …”
Looking at online permitting Christenson said he’d just returned from attending his first meeting of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles will head the IOGCC next year and its 2001 annual meeting will be held in Anchorage.
The commission has in-house computer projects ongoing, with a lot of data loaded into the system, Christenson said.
Johnston noted that the commission also has “a relationship with the University of Alaska Fairbanks” for computer work and that confidentiality agreements should be in place soon so that the commission can share some data with UAF.
The commission will soon begin accepting electronic data from well logs, Christenson said, as a precursor to building a database. There is a fair amount of interest across the country, he said, in submission of data electronically. That was discussed at the IOGCC, he said, and seven states have some electronic permitting. Alaska will be tracking those efforts and exchanging information as those projects move forward, Christenson said.
“So it’s a pretty high-interest item, I’d say, because everybody’s got the same problems that we do. They’re basically paper systems.”
Christenson said that with the funds the commission has now it will be looking just at investigations and pilot programs — pretty small scale efforts.
“But our ultimate goal is to be able to have the operators file over the Internet and to have the public access non-confidential files over the Internet. That’s the direction we’re headed in…”
Oechsli said that the commission is also looking at what other departments in state government are doing with historic documents.
“We’re just exploring what options are out there. We’re at the very beginning stages of collecting information to see whether it’s feasible or not,” she said.
Oechsli said the Department of Education has been scanning historic documents in preparation for Internet access for the public, “but we have some more data gathering to do before we can make a decision about whether or not that’s going to be a feasible project for us to take on.”
She noted that the commission has “rooms full of paper and so for access and storage both it would be nice to have an easier way…”
Christenson said that the commission has been talking with the state group for information technology and the information technology group within the Department of Administration. “And there’s a good body of knowledge in both of those groups with regard to doing the kinds of things we’re talking about and so we’re trying to leverage up on that because these people were the ones who were responsible for setting up the DMV on the Internet.
“So we’re trying not to reinvent the wheel there and use all the data we can that’s available.”
| 