The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has released a draft environmental impact statement for ExxonMobil’s proposed Point Thomson natural gas condensate development on Alaska’s North Slope.
The EIS compares ExxonMobil’s project against four alternatives: no action; inland work pads with gravel access road; inland pads with seasonal ice road access; and coastal pads with seasonal ice roads.
The no action alternative “would result from the Corps not issuing a permit for gravel fill and other construction activities,” the EIS executive summary says.
The draft EIS was an anxiously awaited document, coming several months later than the Corps had originally planned.
ExxonMobil needs the wetlands permit to build out the project and start production.
It remains to be seen whether the company will have enough time to get through the EIS process and still fulfill its pledge to start production from Point Thomson by year-end 2014.
Disputed field
Point Thomson is a rich but undeveloped oil and gas field along the Beaufort Sea coastline, next to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Besides ExxonMobil, other major stakeholders in Point Thomson include BP, Chevron and ConocoPhillips.
All the companies are involved in a court fight to maintain control of the Point Thomson acreage, which the state has moved to reclaim due to lack of development from the field since its discovery in the 1970s.
The state and the oil companies are trying to settle the matter. State officials have said they’ve reached a “resolution in principle” with ExxonMobil as the field operator, but the other companies have not yet signed onto the deal.
In response to the state’s pressure, ExxonMobil proposed the project to produce 10,000 barrels a day of gas condensate from the highly pressurized Thomson sand reservoir. The condensate is produced by cycling natural gas through a surface processing plant to collect the liquids, with the dry gas then shot back underground.
ExxonMobil already has drilled a pair of wells at Point Thomson. The seaside wells angle out to target the reservoir, the majority of which is offshore.
The EIS examines the proposed construction of a central well pad, an east well pad, a west well pad, a central processing facility, a gravel airstrip, gravel roads, a new gravel mine, a variety of camp and shop buildings, and pipelines — including a 22-mile pipe running west to carry Point Thomson liquids to the existing Badami pipeline.
Development alternatives
ExxonMobil put in its application for a wetlands permit in October 2009, triggering the development of the EIS — a document that, with appendices, runs thousands of pages.
Besides ExxonMobil’s proposed development, the EIS looks at alternatives, one of which would simply disallow the development.
Two other alternatives would require ExxonMobil to push some pads inland, “to minimize impacts to coastal resources,” the EIS says. A central processing pad would be two miles inland, while the east and west well pads would be half a mile inland. Both alternatives would eliminate the barge landing ExxonMobil proposes at Point Thomson. Access to the remote field, located some 60 miles east of Prudhoe Bay, would be by gravel road under one alternative or by tundra ice road under the other.
A final alternative would permit ExxonMobil to place all its well pads right along the coast, but would “reduce impacts to wetlands and surrounding water resources by minimizing the development footprint,” the EIS says. For the most part, only ice roads would be allowed in the field, and the gravel airstrip would have to be shorter — too short for C-130 cargo planes, which could “limit the ability of the project to bring in large equipment by air,” the EIS says.
The document includes detailed graphics showing how each alternative would look on the ground.
The Corps, in the draft EIS, does not appear to favor any one alternative.
Noisy ANWR neighbor?
One reason the EIS process is running roughly a year behind schedule is the time it took to complete certain studies, including one to assess the potential impact of industrial noise on neighboring ANWR.
HDR, a contractor developing the EIS on behalf of ExxonMobil under the direction of the Corps, prepared a 208-page “noise technical report” attached to the EIS as an appendix.
The noise issue drew consternation from Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell, who in October 2010 said he was thinking of suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for holding up the Point Thomson development by getting into the “crazy territory” of studying noise impacts on ANWR.
The EPA is among the federal and state agencies cooperating with the Corps on the EIS.
The EIS says noise from human activity in the remote Point Thomson area is now “largely absent,” and that, yes, noise would increase with field construction and operations, due especially to aircraft traffic.
Noise levels could vary depending on the season, and on the speed and direction of winds, the EIS says.
The EIS will be up for public comment until Jan. 3. The document is available online at pointthomsonprojecteis.com.
A series of public meetings is planned in December on the draft EIS. Meetings will be held in Anchorage and Fairbanks and in the North Slope villages of Kaktovik, Nuiqsut and Barrow.
The Anchorage meeting will be on the evening of Dec. 5, and the Fairbanks meeting will be on the evening of Dec. 7.
The Corps plans to publish a final EIS in early fall of 2012 and a record of decision in late 2012.
—Wesley Loy
