BLM expected to issue revised environmental review of ConoocPhillips’ Willow oil project on Friday

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is set to issue a long-awaited revised environmental review for ConocoPhillips’ Willow project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, according to sources familiar with the project.

Willow, a $6 billion project, has been stalled for almost a year since a federal court in Anchorage voided permits for the project after conservation groups filed lawsuits. Since the court decision the company and the BLM have been working on a revised development plan.

The new plan will likely be described in the DEIS expected out Friday.

If construction proceeds Willow would produce 160,000 barrels per day with production beginning in late 2025 or 2025.

Sources in federal agencies and industry, who asked not to be identified, said a new Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, or DEIS, will be published in the Federal Register Friday, July 1.

Lois Epstein, a technical consultant to conservation groups, said she has also been told by colleagues in Washington, D.C. that publication of the revised DEIS will come in early July.

Federal Register publication triggers a 45-day public review process, but conservation groups are likely to push for an extension of that.

Willow is west of the producing Alpine field on the North Slope, has been on hold since August, 2021 after a federal court judge in Alaska sided with conservation groups in a lawsuit claiming BLM’s Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS, was flawed.

In a decision U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason ordered the BLM to do a more thorough review of alternatives. The revised EIS will likely include new configurations for roads and production pads on sensitive wetlands in the area, but it may also include restrictions operations like seasonal limits on certain road activity, sources familiar with the project said.

Gleason also ordered a more thorough review of long-term greenhouse gas emissions that will result from the project, and that is likely to be included in a new environmental review.

Parts of Gleason’s 2021 decision upheld BLM’s review of Willow, however. Significantly, the judge ruled the agency’s analysis of cumulative long-term environmental impacts was adequate. Conservation groups have long argued that federal agencies fail to assess long-term impacts of projects, but in Willow’s case Judge Gleason upheld BLM’s review.

Willow is ConocoPhillips’ fourth project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a large 23-million-acre federal land enclave in the western North Slope.

The company has been exploring prospective areas in the northeast NPR-A for years and has put three smaller projects, CD 5, GMT 1 and GMT 2, into production, each of them built in increments as pipeline and road infrastructure was extended west from the Alpine field on state lands.

Development of Willow, if it proceeds, will be much more important because it will include on-site plants for oil and gas processing as well as camps and other support facilities, and will become a kind of hub for ongoing exploration and development in the area.

The earlier, smaller projects now producing do not have on-site processing, however, and ship raw produced liquids including crude oil, water and gas, by pipeline to the Alpine field where the liquids are processed for delibery to the Trans Alaska Pipeline System further east at Prudhoe Bay.

Willow’s “stand-alone” plant facilities are strategically important ConocoPhillips has identified nearby prospects through exploration that could be similar to Willow, and the presence of nearby infrastructure at Willow will increase chances that they will be economically viable.

The NPR-A was originally created in 1923 as a strategic oil reserve for the U.S. Navy but despite decades of exploration by federal agencies and by industry no commercial-scale discoveries were made until ConocoPhillips began its exploration.