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BLM plan for NPR-A not set in stone Director says agency being cautious in protecting environmental resources but plan can be re-opened as circumstances change Alan Bailey Petroleum News
With the Bureau of Land Management having chosen the most restrictive option for its new activity plan for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, Bud Cribley, the agency’s Alaska director, put on a brave face when facing the overwhelmingly pro-development audience at the Resource Development Council’s annual Alaska Resources Conference on Nov. 15.
The new plan, announced in August, would make about 11.8 million acres of the 22 million acre reserve available for oil and gas leasing, leaving much of the prospective northern part of the reserve off limits. Cribley said that according to the latest U.S. Geological Survey study of the reserve, the area open for leasing makes available about 72 percent of the reserve’s likely oil and gas resources.
“We are committed to offer annual (lease) sales to companies that are expressing interest for oil and gas leasing and in the interim identifying and protecting those critical resource values, habitat values that exist on the NPR-A,” Cribley said.
This is the first time that BLM has developed a single plan for the entire NPR-A, having previously developed separate plans for the northeastern and northwestern sectors of the reserve. And Cribley emphasized that the new plan is not cast in stone for the indefinite future.
“These are not permanent decisions,” Cribley said. “These are decisions that can be changed at later dates and it is anticipated that these decisions will change. A lot of that’s going to be dependent on how future development takes place on the North Slope and in this corner of the North Slope.”
Learn from experience Cribley said that BLM’s cautious approach in the new NPR-A plan derives from experience in the western United States, where for a number of years the agency has followed a policy of offering all federal land for leasing, with the agency assessing environmental resources and environmental protection requirements only on land that subsequently becomes leased. This approach of making everything available and then trying to fix issues afterwards has led to many problems in protecting critical environmental resources, he said.
Instead, BLM wants to take a more incremental approach in the NPR-A, recognizing critical environmental values up front and then revisiting plan decisions in the light of new information and new oil and gas interest, as circumstances change, Cribley said. And the plan, as it now stands, does not prevent companies progressing their current projects in NPR-A, he said.
“The preferred alternative does not prohibit or get in the way of existing development that’s occurring right now, particularly in the Colville area adjacent to the Alpine facility, and then down around Umiat and the development that is starting to occur down in that area,” Cribley said.
The only other area where BLM is seeing particular oil industry interest is around Teshekpuk Lake, in northeastern NPR-A. But BLM views this area as holding particularly high wildlife resource values, including caribou, water bird and shore bird habitat, as well as being an important area for subsistence use.
Infrastructure driven Cribley said that BLM sees future NPR-A oil and gas interest as likely to be driven primarily by the development of new pipeline infrastructure across the reserve, if new offshore oil fields are brought on line in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. Shell, ConocoPhillips and Statoil are conducting outer continental shelf exploration in these seas, and there are active state oil and gas leases in the coastal waters of the Beaufort Sea, in Harrison Bay and Smith Bay on the north side of the NPR-A.
If there is offshore development and the subsequent construction of infrastructure in the NPR-A “that’s going to change the whole game and the whole perspective of development, and the economics of oil and gas development in the NPR-A. … That is probably the bigger issue than what is going to be available for oil and gas leasing in the short term,” Cribley said.
To avoid any hindrance to future offshore development, the NPR-A plan allows for the construction of surface infrastructure across a much broader extent of land than the regions open for oil and gas leasing. For example, there is just a relatively small area around Teshekpuk Lake where surface infrastructure will be prohibited, within a much larger area around the lake off limits to leasing. The plan provides for a large pipeline corridor from the Chukchi Sea, as well as having corridors from both Harrison Bay and Smith Bay, Cribley said.
Restriction rationale Cribley also described the rationale behind BLM’s selection of land earmarked for special environmental protection.
A restricted area around the Chukchi Sea coastal village of Wainwright was carried forward from an earlier plan for northwestern NPR-A. Leasing in that area has been deferred until 2014 to allow time for the collection of new data concerning the resources available in the area, Cribley said. But BLM has added a new special area around Peard Bay, to the north of Wainwright, where leasing would be unavailable. Peard Bay is a haul out area for marine mammals, as well as being a staging area for migrating birds and being important for subsistence use, Cribley said.
The area around Teshekpuk Lake had already been restricted in a previous northeast NPR-A plan, but in the new plan BLM has enlarged the restricted area from 1.75 million acres to 3.65 million acres to protect critical resource values including wildlife such as speckled eiders and yellow billed loons, Cribley said. Towards the southwest of NPR-A, BLM has expanded the Utukok River Uplands special area, a calving and insect-relief area for the 325,000-animal Western Arctic caribou herd.
“That herd is one of the more significant herds — the largest herds — in Alaska right now,” Cribley said. “Over 40 Native villages depend on that herd for subsistence hunting … throughout the year.”
And BLM has left intact the Colville River special area, another special area carried forward from previous plans, in the southeast corner of NPR-A, around Umiat.
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