|
BLM schedules remediation at Umiat wells Agency has tackled NPR-A legacy wells intermittently; in recent years more federal money has become available for cleanup work Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management said remediation work is scheduled to begin in March on legacy wells near Umiat within the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
Alaska officials and the state’s congressional delegation have been pushing for cleanup of legacy wells, 136 exploratory wells and boreholes drilled between 1944 and 1982 by the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Geological Survey.
BLM took over management of NPR-A in 1976 and inherited the responsibility to assess, plug and remediate these wells in 1982.
The agency has cleaned up some of the old wells and its 2013 Legacy Wells Strategic Plan outlined priorities and actions the agency will take to clean up NPR-A legacy wells.
Agreement with Corps Current remediation work is being done under an interagency agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the agency said in a March 2 statement. The Corps has awarded a contract to Marsh Creek LLC to plug three wells, Umiat No. 1, No. 3 and No. 11. BLM said the contract also calls for removal of wellheads from Umiat No. 4, No. 8 and No. 10, with total cost of the project, including mobilization and demobilization, pegged at about $10 million.
BLM has previously done work at Umiat, with remediation work on Umiat No. 6, No. 7 and No. 9 completed in 2011 and 2012.
The agency said it has plugged 18 wells and remediated four reserve pits at a cost of nearly $86 million since 2002.
Earlier work included the 2005 emergency cleanup of the JW Dalton test well site in NPR-A - accelerated erosion along the Beaufort Sea cut about 300 feet of shoreline, putting the JW Dalton well casing within 15 feet of the sea and partially breaching the well’s reserve pit. BLM secured emergency cleanup funds for the work and from February through May 2005, a team consisting of BLM employees in Alaska and elsewhere worked with a contractor to haul more than 300 truckloads of reserve pit material four miles to secure storage, pending final disposal. Ten thousand gallons of diesel fuel were removed from the well and the bore was plugged. Within six months of the cleanup, summer storms had washed the project site into the sea.
BLM said at the time that as a result of that emergency cleanup it initiated a systematic approach to inventory other old government drilled and abandoned well sites in NPR-A to determine if other sites were endangered by shoreline erosion, with 10 other sites of concern identified.
In recent years, BLM officials have said they doubted remaining sites posed a serious hazard. State regulators, notably Cathy Foerster, chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commissions, and state Rep. Clarisse Millett, R-Anchorage, have disagreed, arguing that there were hazards at the old sites and that it was the duty of the federal government to address those hazards.
Funding an issue In 2013, with release of its strategic plan to plug and clean up NPR-A wells, BLM said half, or 68, of the legacy wells required no action because they had been remediated or posed no threat. The plan identified 50 wells as requiring attention, including 16 priority wells.
Funding for cleanup has been a challenge for the agency, but the Helium Stewardship Act passed in September 2013 included funds for BLM legacy well cleanup through fiscal year 2019.
The 2013 Helium Stewardship Act, which U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, helped author, provided $50 million for remediation and close up of abandoned oil and gas wells on current or former national petroleum reserve lands.
BLM Alaska received $10 million as a first installment of that funding and BLM expects to receive another $37 million for fiscal year 2015 and a final $3 million in fiscal year 2019.
| 