State agencies get DOE grant to improve permitting, access to data

Petroleum News Alaska Staff

The state of Alaska is receiving a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for the “Alaska Oil and Gas Exploration, Development and Permitting Project.”

Alaska agencies on the project team include the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the Division of Governmental Coordination, the Lands Records Information Section in the Department of Natural Resources, DNR’s Division of Oil and Gas and the Department of Fish and Game.

Mark Myers, director of the Division of Oil and Gas, and Pat Galvin, then director of the Division of Governmental Coordination, described the grant application in May.

“The state has been looking at ways to make our processes more efficient,” Myers said, and identified “a potential Department of Energy grant that will help us in multiple areas.”

Galvin said DOE “has made some money available to government agencies, state and local level, to use GIS technology to improve and speed up the permitting process and … make oil and gas development occur quicker.”

One of the goals of the grant, Myers said, would be to get all of the released well data on file at the AOGCC on a server from which companies could download to their own systems. Permitting could also be standardized, he said, by providing better interagency coordination between DGC, the AOGCC and DNR.

The overall goal of the DOE grant program is to increase the production of domestic oil. The intent of the Alaska proposal is to increase development activity from small to moderate sized firms by providing them with extensive public information on existing wells via the Internet.

This is a two-year project and involves the purchase of digital well logs for wells drilled before 1986, when AOGCC began requiring log data to be submitted in digital form, streamlining the DGC permitting process and funding for Fish and Game to publish an electronic North Slope fisheries atlas for timely environmental reviews.

The state match for the $1.4 million grant is about $600,000.