BLM releases more details on gas project

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management released details last week on ConocoPhillips’s planned Willow oil and gas project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, which would be a major development project if it proceeds.

Conservation groups are meanwhile gearing up to fight the BLM’s fast-tracking of an environmental review of the project. Under a new procedure the agency must complete its draft Environmental Impact Statement within a year.

In a plan submitted to BLM ConocoPhillips has proposed a project involving a central oil and gas process facility; up to five drill pads with 50 producing wells on each pad; in-field roads; an airstrip and a temporary offshore artificial island in Harrison Bay, to the north, that would facilitate the unloading of large production process modules for the field.

Willow is expected to cost $2 billion to $3 billion to develop.

BLM released the proposed development plan as part of a Notice of Intent published in the Federal Register last week, which signaled the start of a EIS process for Willow, a step in the federal permitting for the project.

Under the Interior Department’s rules the draft EIS must be completed within 12 months, or by mid-2019, with the final document and Record of Decision coming later in the year.

Conservation groups are criticizing the fast-track review and also the low priority being given by the BLM to a NPR-A comprehensive land management plan that has been in place for several years.

“By fast-tracking the Willow project’s environmental review, (the Trump administration) is again denying the public opportunities to express concerns, and they are not providing sufficient time to adequately analyze scientific data and properly determine the potential negative effects of this development,” said Nicole Whittington-Evans, Alasja director for the Wilderness Society.

“We will be working to ensure that the Western Arctic’s rich habitat and subsistence resources are protected,” she said.

While there are concerns about Willow’s environmental impacts the discovery is inland in the northeast NPR-A and away from ecologically sensitive coastal areas where there are lagoons, lakes and wetlands that are important habitat for migrating birds.

However, the network of roads and pipelines being built into the reserve will lead to further development as oil development extends west, adding to cumulative environmental impacts.

ConocoPhillips’ “sanction,” or formal approval, for construction of Willow could come in 2021 and that the field could be producing between 2023 and 2025.

Meanwhile, the company has revised Willow’s resource estimate upward to between 400 million and 750 million barrels based on drilling done earlier this year. In January 2017 ConocoPhillips estimated Willow’s production at 100,000 barrels per day, with that based on reserves estimated at 300 million barrels.

Willow is the latest in a string of new projects, all smaller than Willow, ConocoPhillips has pursued in the northeast NPR-A, a large 23-million-acre reserve west of the main producing fields of the North Slope, which are on state-owned lands.

The company has one of the NPR-A projects, CD-5 near the Colville River, now in production. Two others are GMT-1, due to begin production late this year, and GMT-2, due to begin production in 2021. GMT-1 and GMT-2 are expected to produce 30,000 barrels per day each. CD-5 is now producing about 36,000 barrels per day, ConocoPhillips said.

BLM said it will streamline its regulatory process for Willow by combining its approval of the company’s Master Development Plan, or MDP, and an Environmental Impact Statement, of EIS, which were previously done separately in sequence.

“Analyzing the proposed Willow prospect in a single MDP/EIS will result in a quicker and more efficient process for the approval of applications to drill,” a permit that BLM issues in the petroleum reserve, said Acting BLM Alaska director Karen Mouritsen said in a statement.

“Public input in this project is important and we look forward to public meetings and listening to comments people may have,” she said.

A significant aspect of Willow is that it will extend pipeline and road infrastructure further west into NPR-A which will speed development of other prospects including some already discovered.

ConocoPhillips itself has already found oil an exploration well drilled further west last winter, now appropriately named Willow West. No details on the discovery have been released.

Commercial oil development has been a long time coming for the NPR-A.

President Warren Harding ordered the creation of the petroleum reserve as Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4 in 1923.

Although no oil had been discovered at the time Harding acted on the advice of federal geologists who had visited the North Slope and found oil seeps.

After World War II the U.S. Navy, which then administered the reserve, mounted a major program of exploration, resulting in one small oilfield being discovered at Umiat, at the southeast edge of the reserve, and a gas field in NPR-4’s far north at Barrow (now utqiagvik), which now supplies gas to the Inupiat community.

The reserve was transferred to the Interior Department and BLM in 1975 and a second government-sponsored exploration program under the U.S. Geological Survey again failed to find commercial deposits.

Leasing to private companies began under the Ronald Reagan administration, but private drilling efforts by major companies again yielded no results until discoveries were finally made by companies including ConocoPhillips and Anadarko Petroleum Corp., who were partners in exploration, after 2000. ConocoPhillips bought out Andarko’s minority interest on the North Slope earlier this year.

While the government and industry have had dismal results for decades finding commercial-scale deposits in the reserve ConocoPhillips credits the development of new exploration techniques, like 3-D seismic, in enabling companies to find geological traps holding oil and gas that were missed previously.