Environmental study durations, and how they affect ANWR development, discussed at AOGA conference

The first real test of the U.S. Interior Department’s fast-track approach to regulatory approval of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil exploration will come with the department’s compressed 12-month schedule for an Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS, along with a slimmed-down analysis of impacts.

The new policy applies now only to Interior Department actions and not to EIS documents prepared by other agencies, such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Joe Balash, Interior’s Assistant Secretary for Lands and Minerals, said the 12-month clock starts when Interior publishes a Notice of Intent in the Federal Register. For ANWR exploration that occurred in March, which means the final EIS must be completed by late March 2019.

Balash spoke at a May 30 conference in Anchorage hosted by the Alaska Oil and Gas Association. He also said Interior hopes to hold the first of two planned lease sales in the refuge in July, 2019.

The streamlined schedule for the EIS, which covers only exploration, and not development activity, will provide one angle of legal attack for conservation groups opposing development in the refuge’s coastal plain, which is believed to have substantial oil and gas resources.

Environmental Impact Statement documents for large projects have usually taken several years, with two years at minimum the rule of thumb. The EIS for the Donlin Gold project planned for the Kuskokwim River, for example, has taken five years and some, for complex federal highway projects, taken even longer.

The reason agencies have taken longer with EIS documents is to be thorough in an attempt to “bullet proof” the documents against litigation. There are concerns that “streamlining” can result in weaker documents that might be vulnerable legally.

However, Balash said the public itself is not well served by lengthy, complex EIS documents. “Who will take the time to read 2,400 pages of an EIS? It does nothing to advance understanding and the public transparency,” he said.

Interior hired consultants to map out a procedure for more concise, readable documents that are hoped to still withstand litigation. “There were pockets of resistance (within the agencies) but the vast majority of our employees support this approach because they want to help these projects succeed,” Balash said.

One of the impediments to development of new resource projects in Alaska is the long “lead time” between a discovery and development that is created partly by the lengthy regulatory process.

Anything that reduces that will help project developers succeed, Balash said.

Meanwhile, the first ANWR legal skirmish could develop this summer and fall, however, over an application to the Interior Department by SAExploration, an Alaska-based seismic company, to conduct a winter seismic program to gather subsurface data that can be used by companies to plan their bids in a lease sale.

SAExploration is planning its program on behalf of several industry clients, who are unidentified. A seismic program was also conducted in ANWR in the 1980s by several companies, which shared the information with the U.S. Geological Survey, an Interior department agency.

The USGS used the information to make estimates of potential oil resources in ANWR.

The controversy that may erupt over the seismic application is that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is the agency that manages wildlife refuges including ANWR, has deemed SA Exploration’s application as incomplete and lacking in certain protections for wildlife.

This could set up an internal fight within Interior between USF&W, which has its legal obligations to protect wildlife, and Interior officials, like Balash, who have been given orders to get the leasing underway.

The federal Tax and Jobs Act of 2007, which authorized ANWR leasing, assigned responsibility for the lease sale itself to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management because of that agency’s experience in conducting Arctic lease sales in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, which is also on the North Slope.

However, the USF&WS still retains overall management authority for ANWR. Interior Secretary Ron Zinke will have to sort this out, and if Zinke appears to run roughshod over USF&WS concerns it may provide another opening for litigation.

Nicole Whittington-Evans, the Wilderness Society’s Alaska regional director, provided the opening shot on this looming fight in comments at an ANWR “scoping” hearing held in Anchorage June 30.

“As the agency with expertise in and jurisdiction over refuge resources and management, the Fish & Wildlife Service must be intimately involved in the leasing EIS,” Whittington-Evans said at the hearing.

“BLM (in planning the lease sale) must fully consider the original purposes of the Arctic Refuge, which focus on preserving and protecting fish, wildlife, habitat, subsistence, wilderness, recreation, and water resources,” she said.

“The newly added purpose in the tax bill (leasing) does not render the other conservation purposes irrelevant,” Whittington-Evans said.