Interior plans accelerated reviews for ANWR leasing

The U.S. Interior Department will kick off its environmental review of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge leasing using the department’s new policy of completing an EIS within one year and limiting it to 300 pages. In the past EIS documents have exceeded 1,000 pages and have taken several years.

If the EIS is expedited, however, it may provide openings for inevitable lawsuits led by U.S. environmental groups. One group, The Wilderness Society, already sees this as a good line of attack. “Our expectation has been that it will be very difficult for agencies to complete the review and analysis needed for a complex issue such as opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing within such timeline and page limits,” said Nada Culver, Senior Counsel to The Wilderness Society, a major U.S. conservation group.

“We expect quite a bit of litigation, and quite a lot of it successful, coming out of this new policy direction,” Culver said in a statement. The new EIS policy came through Interior Secretarial Order 3355 signed by Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt.

Interior has already started preparations for leasing in the coastal plain of ANWR.“We expect to publish a Notice of Intent to begin an Environmental Impact Statement very soon. That will kick off a 60-day series of ‘scoping’ meetings, after which we begin preparation of the draft EIS,” Joe Bal- ash, DOI’s Assistant Secretary for Land and Water Management, told us (Balash is an Alaskan and a formed state Commissioner of Natural Resources).

Balash said Interior has not yet decided whether to offer up 400,000 acres in an “areawide” lease sale or to make smaller blocks available for bidding. One problem is that subsurface information available to the department is limited to results of one geophysical survey in the 1980s that was done with older seismic technology. DOI received the data along with several companies which funded the survey. “We expect to see applications for more seismic next winter,” done with modern seismic technology, Balash said.

The state of Alaska might chip into this with a $10 million contribution to an industry-led group seismic “shoot” to help get it moving, state natural resources commissioner Andy Mack said. Alaska has a stake in the leasing because it will receive 50 percent of bonus bids and production royalties under the legislation passed in December, Mack said. The seismic survey could cost up to $80 million to $100 million, according to industry estimates. Balash said the federal government has estimated that its 50 percent share of the rst lease sale bids will total $1 billion, so the state would receive an equal amount.

Exploration in the 1.2-million-acre coastal plain within the refuge, considered highly prospective by geologists, has been a political hot button for decades. Congress once granted approval only to have President Bill Clinton veto the bill. A second attempt came near to passage under the second Bush administration but was defeated 51-49 In a Republican-controlled U.S. Senate. Late last year Alaska’s congressional delegation tucked a provision into the federal tax bill passed by Congress by grants approval and also requires the Department of the Interior to hold two lease sales of 400,000 acres within 10 years. The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated the potential for discovery of up to 10 billion barrels of oil in the coastal plain.

Two kinks that DOI has to work out: One, ANWR is still under the Obama-era recommendation that the coastal plain be designated wilderness, which means that until the recommendation is formally pulled the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages them as if they were wilderness. Second, the U.S, Fish & Wildlife Service is the refuge manager and the agency has not done an Arctic oil and gas lease sale. Would the U.S. Bureau of Land Management be brought in to manage the sale? BLM does do Arctic sales, in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

In terms of overall size, the Arctic refuge is the nation’s largest wildlife refuge covering 19.2 million acres and extending south from the Arctic coast to the southern Brooks Range. Most of its lands are designated as wilderness, but the 1.2 million acres of the coastal plain were kept out of the wilderness-designated area because of their petroleum potential.