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Interior to Allow Oil and Gas Drilling in NPR-A

Posted on: Thursday, 12 January 2006, 21:00 CST

By Wesley Loy, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska

Jan. 12--The Interior Department on Wednesday announced it will open hundreds of thousands of acres of wildlife-rich North Slope tundra to oil and gas drillers.

The land is just north of giant Teshekpuk Lake in the northeast corner of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an Indiana-sized tract set aside in 1923 for its oil potential.

The lake region is noted for some of the world's largest congregations of migratory geese, as well as caribou and other wildlife. But it also might harbor huge deposits of oil and gas.

Naturalists fought hard to head off Wednesday's decision, which they say dismantles a long policy of government protection for the land.

"We're pretty bummed out," said Stan Senner, Alaska chief for the National Audubon Society. "The Bush administration is turning back the clock. They're leasing an area that even the Reagan administration believed was deserving of protection."

The Interior action comes on the heels of the defeated effort by Alaska's congressional delegation and the Bush administration to open another swatch of North Slope tundra -- the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the east -- to oil development.

"We defeated them on the Arctic refuge and they've come right back and are throwing this at us," Senner said.

Henri Bisson, head of Interior's Alaska office of the Bureau of Land Management, which acts as landlord for the petroleum reserve, said the ANWR connection is "just speculation."

The real issue on Interior's plate, Bisson said, was whether it was good for the country to continue to ban drilling in the Teshekpuk Lake area. By leasing 389,000 new acres north and east of the lake, drillers will have the chance to find and produce an estimated 2 billion barrels of oil and 3.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

That's a lot.

By comparison, 15 billion barrels of oil have flowed so far from Prudhoe Bay and other North Slope fields since production started in 1977.

The Interior leasing plan includes an array of protections for geese, caribou and other wildlife around Teshekpuk, including strict limits on industry sprawl in the area, Bisson said. The land will be leased in seven big chunks, and oil companies will be allowed to install gravel pads and oil field equipment on no more than 300 acres in each.

That means industry can set up shop on less than 1 percent of the area to be leased, Bisson said.

In response to concerns raised by the North Slope Borough, the Interior Department also expanded protective buffer zones around subsistence hunting cabins along the lake from 1,200 feet to one mile during the winter drilling season, he said. The leasing plan also includes protections for caribou migration routes.

Exploratory oil drilling and seismic testing occurs in winter when the tundra is frozen, and when black brant and other migratory birds are down south. The bureau is confident it can lease the land and not hurt wildlife, Bisson said.

"This is a petroleum reserve," he said. "Our mission is to carry out a responsible program for oil and gas development while protecting the sensitive resources that are there."

Tom Lohman of the North Slope Borough said the borough opposed leasing around Teshekpuk, and the bureau's plan "is a huge gamble" that could hurt wildlife and local residents.

Dawn Patience, spokeswoman for oil company Conoco Phillips, welcomed the Interior decision.

"The BLM is a good partner and also a very good environmental steward for the area," she said. "They have balanced the interest of many stakeholders in this."

Patience added: "The resulting lease sale will likely generate a lot of industry interest."

The petroleum reserve is regarded as a promising western frontier for the industry. To date, the North Slope oil industry has focused around the giant Prudhoe Bay strike to the east. In recent years, the industry has crawled west, leasing and exploring millions of acres of land in the reserve. Conoco has been the most active driller, sinking 17 exploratory holes since 1999.

But the reserve is remote and devoid of pipelines and roads, and no oil has been pumped from the area. That could change by the end of the decade, as Conoco is seeking permits to produce oil from some small discoveries on the reserve's eastern edge. It plans to pipe that oil to its Alpine oil field, just east of the reserve, for processing.

Senner and other environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of undoing Teshekpuk protections put in place in 1998 by then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who cited the abundant wildlife there. The protections date back much further than the Clinton administration, they say, and defenders of the area included Reagan's Interior chief, James Watt.

Teshekpuk is one of the largest lakes in Alaska. It and the adjacent treeless, lake-pocked tundra provide ideal and critical habitat for tens of thousands of black brant and other migratory birds, which flock there each summer to molt and feed.

National environmental groups, with other organizations such as the Pacific Flyway Council, an 11-state body that helps manage migratory birds, urged Interior officials not to open the Teshekpuk area. Other government agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, also lodged concerns.

The critics say industry activity could easily spook the birds, some of which recently have experienced disturbing population declines. The geese are important to Alaska subsistence hunters as well as sport hunters from Alaska to Mexico.

"We can drill every last acre of wilderness and it won't make us any more secure. ... We can't drill our way to energy independence," according to a statement Wednesday from the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the many environmental groups decrying the Interior decision.

The groups contend that Interior, in effect, is making 100 percent of the northeast petroleum reserve, a total of 4.6 million acres, open to drillers. Bisson disputed that, saying some sensitive acreage, including the 211,000-acre surface of Teshekpuk Lake, will not be leased, at least not immediately.

The bureau hopes to have a lease sale as soon as this fall.

In anticipation of Wednesday's action, a coalition of environmental groups last year filed a federal lawsuit against the agency.

"Our goal is to see that there never is a lease sale in that area north of the lake," said Audubon's Senner.

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Source: Anchorage Daily News

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