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MMS gears back up for Liberty environmental impact statement Agencies using facilitator to ensure all issues get on table early in process; MMS plans concise, clearly written document Kristen Nelson PNA News Editor
The U.S. Minerals Management Service has restarted work on the environmental impact statement for BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc.’s Liberty project, the Beaufort Sea development which will follow BP’s Northstar development.
BP submitted its development proposal in early 1998 and scoping meetings were held and a report on the meetings completed. Then work on Liberty slowed as Northstar was delayed. MMS officials told PNA in a July interview that Liberty meetings began between agencies in late spring.
John Goll, MMS Alaska regional director, said MMS — the lead agency for the Liberty EIS — is making a special effort to make sure that issues from the permitting agencies are on the table at the beginning of the process. Right now, Goll said, the U.S Army Corps of Engineers is a cooperating agency for the EIS and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering joining as a cooperating agency. The North Slope Borough, the Alaska Division of Governmental Coordination, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, Joint Pipeline Office, Alaska Department of Natural Resources, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are not cooperating in the formal sense, he said, but are participating.
“It’s just a matter of work load,” he said. Cooperators sit in at every meeting if they want to and participating permitting agencies are invited to the meetings and will be reviewing things, but may not have the staff to dedicate to attending every meeting.
Facilitator to help with issues Goll said that MMS has hired a facilitator to help work through some of the issues.
“We just thought that would help us and the other agencies to really sort out what the issues are and how to deal with them,” he said.
“It was primarily aimed at the pipeline issue, which was an issue on Northstar. And so for Liberty we’re looking at that issue of … the design of the pipeline: Are there other alternatives we do want to consider for the EIS?”
Goll emphasized that MMS is not asking agencies to make decisions now.
“But what we’re asking is, let’s try, as much as we can, to identify what people see as the big issues — and that’s things that will be an issue, that could be an issue to them later — let’s get those out now so we can evaluate them.”
Paul Stang, MMS regional supervisor of leasing and environment, said MMS wants to get everyone’s concerns in from the start in the Liberty EIS.
“We hoped we had done all of that in our scoping process in early ’98, but we learned some lessons from Northstar,” Stang said. A group of agencies worked on the Northstar EIS on which the Corps of Engineers was the lead agency, but at the end, the agencies couldn’t agree on a pipeline route for the project.
“One thing that came up in Northstar was an alternative pipeline routing that I believe had been raised in some tangential way before, but then came up as the kind of compromise solution or something” late in the process, Stang said. “And … that’s not the time, in my book, that you want to start creating new alternatives,” he said.
Short, cogent, in plain English MMS is actually writing the Liberty EIS, Stang said. He noted that it’s the first EIS of its type the Alaska region has written, “so,” he said, “we’ve got about 15 EIS writers who are converting, mentally, from writing EIS lease sales to writing development projects.” An EIS for a development project has a much narrower focus, he said.
For a lease sale, Stang said, “we set the terms and we have to decide — lease this part, lease that part on these conditions … and if we decide we’re not going to do it, we don’t do it.”
With the EIS for a development project, however, “it’s a different world,” Stang said. “They got a lease. They found oil. They are obliged to make a proposal to develop that oil. We have laws that say you can’t just sit on your oil.”
Stang said his goal is to keep the EIS “very readable and slim and cogent and to the point…” And that’s a battle, he said, as there are always moves to “throw in that 500-page appendix.”
“We’re really working hard to get this thing written in plain understandable English,” Stang said. “Not losing the essence of it, not losing the merit and scientific basic of it — but very clear, understandable stuff.”
“And I’m convinced that any person in a technical field can communicate in plain English if they work on it a little bit. This is not an easy process to convert people to writing plain English, but we’ve been spending a lot of energy trying to do that.”
Facilitated process this fall Stang noted that the facilitated effort is expensive, “so what we’re doing is we’re working kind of in parallel. We meet in a facilitated contest, but we also meet … outside and try to get a lot done so that when we get to the facilitated meeting we’re dealing with the issues that we’re unable to as easily resolve on our own… That way you can really leverage your facilitated effort.”
In addition to the facilitated effort, which is paid for by BP but contracted for by MMS, there are two other contracts involved in the Liberty EIS. One is an engineering evaluation and comparison of pipeline alternatives, Stang said, and the other is a probability of spill analysis of those particular designs.
“Those two efforts would be, are being designed and contracted through this facilitated effort,” he said.
The facilitated effort and the contracts wrap up this fall, Stang said.
“We hope by next spring we can have the DEIS out and the FEIS the following spring.”
Goll said that the cost of an EIS, just internally for MMS, is nominally a million dollars. And that, he said, doesn’t include the time of people on the outside.
Cosmetic changes expected Jeff Walker, MMS regional supervisor, field operations, noted that it has been over a year since BP filed the original Liberty development plan. “At some point,” he said, “BP may have a revised plan.” There have been a lot of updates, largely cosmetic, since the original plan was filed, he said.
MMS also needs, he said, a new schedule.
“Ultimately…when the draft EIS hits the streets it will be with a final proposal” from BP. The draft EIS will have a series of alternatives which the agencies and the borough have agreed need to be substantially evaluated.
After the final EIS is completed, Walker is responsible for preparing the agency’s record of decision, following technical review, regulatory review and based on all input, he said. From the time the final EIS is issued, MMS has 60 days to issue a record of decision.
Liberty first all-OCS Alaska project BP’s Liberty prospect in the Beaufort Sea some 20 miles east of Prudhoe Bay covers a single federal outer continental shelf lease about five miles from shore. BP’s proposal includes a self-contained offshore drilling and production facility on a gravel island and subsea pipelines to shore. BP has estimated that the prospect contains 120 million barrels of recoverable oil.
BP filed development plans in early 1998 and MMS published public notice of the plans and held a series of scoping meetings (see article on Liberty scoping in this section).
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