Push continues on ‘legacy well’ issue

Legislators want governor to mount national campaign to raise awareness about ‘dangerous’ condition of old federal drill sites

Wesley Loy

For Petroleum News

Alaska elected officials continue to push the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to square away dozens of old well sites on the North Slope.

The state House of Representatives has passed a resolution calling on BLM to properly plug the “legacy wells” and reclaim the drill sites. All 40 House members had signed onto House Joint Resolution 29 as co-sponsors.

In Washington, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, is pressing Obama administration officials about the legacy wells. In a March 14 hearing, she told BLM Director Bob Abbey that if private companies had left behind well sites in the same shape as the legacy wells, they would be fined millions of dollars.

On March 19, the state Senate Resources Committee took up HJR 29 and added an amendment from Sen. Wagoner, R-Kenai, urging the governor to take steps to publicize the legacy well problem.

The amendment asks the governor to “disseminate information through appropriate national news outlets and by other available means to increase awareness nationwide of the dangerous conditions of the legacy wells and legacy well sites in the state and the federal government’s failure to plug the legacy wells properly and reclaim the legacy well sites.”

As of March 21, the resolution stood ready to go to the Senate floor for a vote.

The resolution’s prime sponsor, Republican Rep. Charisse Millett of Anchorage, as well as Alaska drilling regulators, say many legacy wells have not been properly plugged, that some holes are open to the air or filled with diesel, and that some well sites are junk-strewn.

The legacy wells are in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a vast federal tract west of the central North Slope oil fields. The Navy, the U.S. Geological Survey and their contractor, Husky Oil, drilled more than 135 wells and “core holes” between 1944 and 1982.

BLM, an agency within the Interior Department, is now responsible for the NPR-A and the old wells.

Money to clean up three wells

Agency officials note it’s extremely expensive to reclaim the remote sites. They further say they don’t believe many of the wells pose any real risk, and that the wells are being monitored.

In a March 14 hearing of the Senate Appropriations Interior Subcommittee, Murkowski explained to her colleagues that the federal government, chiefly the Navy, had drilled exploratory holes in the NPR-A “and then moved on.”

“The problem that we face is they moved on without properly abandoning and caring for those wells,” she said. “Now decades afterwards we’re having some of the casings collapse, we’ve got erosion issues coming in, and it’s not only unsightly but it’s an environmental scar.”

Murkowski asked Abbey to provide the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission with a well inventory, the costs for plugging the wells, and an “action plan” for moving forward on the problem.

“Well, my response would be ... we are committed to working with the state of Alaska to identify where the highest priority needs are for cleanup,” Abbey said. “We have spent millions of dollars to date in cleaning up some of those legacy wells.”

He continued: “This year we do have sufficient funds to clean up an additional three, but as you suggest, and I will admit, that’s pretty slow progress toward dealing with the challenge that we face.”