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Tundra travel test plot work completed State of Alaska and collaborators will be back in spring to measure results; Yale going for funding for 20-year follow-up Kristen Nelson Petroleum News Editor-in-Chief
Increasing the winter work window on Alaska’s North Slope — and enhancing the state’s ability to prevent damage to tundra resources — are the objectives of a collaborative study begun last summer on the North Slope and in the Foothills.
The problem, says Harry Bader, northern district land manager for the Alaska Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Mining, Land and Water Management, is that there were 200 days of tundra access in the 1970s, and that has dropped to 100 days.
That winter tundra access allows companies to explore for oil and gas, and “we are not going to be able to extract oil and gas from the North Slope unless we can explore for it first,” Bader said Feb. 11 in Anchorage at an Alaska Oil and Gas Association forum held in conjunction with the Alaska Forum on the Environment.
The state and collaborators have begun case studies to generate models to assist decision makers who determine when the tundra is open for winter travel.
The goal of the project, Bader said, “is to give industry consistently 130 days for a winter work season” while at the same time maintaining “a level of environmental protection that is either equal to or greater than that which is currently enjoyed with the existing standard.”
Collaborators include the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, which “put the producers and the service operators together and they provided us with in-kind services that were not only important, but made the project possible;” the U.S. Department of Energy’s Arctic Energy Office in Fairbanks, which provided a $270,000 grant; Yale University which is putting in about half a million dollars; and the University of British Columbia. Foothills and coastal plain study sites There are two sites for the study, one on the coastal plain of the North Slope, and one in the Foothills. Bader said the types of vegetation at the two sites were typical of areas affected by tundra travel, and with the selection of the two locations, “we could capture within a reasonably small area of land the majority of the vegetation types that are going to be affected by tundra travel.”
Each site has 30 plots, 100 meters by 50 meters, and five “treatments” were done to the plots on six test dates from October through January. Each “treatment” involved running a specific piece of equipment in a figure eight pattern on each plot on a specific date. For example, a D-7 cat would be driven on a plot on a specific test date. That plot would not be touched again.
The goal, Bader said, “is to represent the spectrum of disturbances that are commonly associated with overland tundra travel for seismic exploration and … in-field development.” The Oct. 30 test date, he said, was added at the request of the North Slope Borough to represent a “worst case” scenario: the ground was not frozen, so the state wouldn’t even be allowed to open tundra to travel that early. Typically in recent years the tundra has been opened to travel in mid-January, he said.
Information was collected at each plot at the time it was tested: snow depth; snow slab thickness; presence and thickness of hoar frost; and overall ground hardness. In the spring, Bader said, quantitative measurements will be taken at the plots.
“And what we’re looking at are … statistically significant differences between pre- and post-treatment in these areas,” Bader said. A model will be developed to link the measured variables, “to determine what kinds of conditions will allow the tundra to be opened up earlier without having the kind of disturbances that we look to avoid,” he said.
The study is only funded through this summer, Bader said. Yale, however, wants to take over long-term monitoring of the plots, and has applied to the National Science Foundation for a grant to monitor the plots continuously for the next 20 years.
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