Nat Herz, Alaska Public Media

As winter turned toward spring last year, a potential problem popped up about 25 miles into the trans-Alaska pipeline’s 800-mile route, where it sits alongside the Sagavanirktok River on the North Slope.

The company that runs the pipeline, Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., notified the Alaska Department of Natural Resources.

“They saw the ice was building up and it looked like it was going to go over the top of their flood control structures,” said Tony Strupulis, DNR’s state pipeline coordinator.

The ensuing flood cost more than $10 million to fix; the damage is still being repaired. And as the North Slope has become wetter and warmer, its rivers have been running at record high levels.

Scientists say they expect those types of trends to continue as Alaska’s climate changes. But they also say there’s still some uncertainty around some of the data on snow and rainfall, and they add that the degree to which climate change will affect the pipeline is still not clear.

“I don’t know the near-term future or long-term future. But the effort to maintain the pipeline will have to improve — they’ll have to spend money to protect it,” said Horacio Toniolo, a civil engineering professor at University of Alaska Fairbanks who’s studied the Sagavanirktok River.

The pipeline system is a robust piece of infrastructure. Adjusting for inflation, it cost $35 billion to build, and the damaged stretch was mostly buried underground. But there’s an unavoidable threat that runs alongside it on the broad, flat area of the North Slope south of Prudhoe Bay: the Sagavanirktok, or Sag River.

Last spring, the river’s normal channel filled up with something called aufeis — basically sheets of layered ice that divert its normal flow. The aufeis, plus an unusually warm spring and quick melt, sent the Sag River toward the pipeline, eroding away Alyeska’s protective barriers.

“It was a pretty broad swath, a new channel that came in and actually scoured away enough material so that there was a section of pipe that was uncovered,” Betsy Haines, Alyeska’s senior vice president for operations and maintenance, said in a phone interview.

The erosion exposed about 90 feet of pipe to the river’s flow — a serious problem that increases the risk of a puncture or spill, though that didn’t happen in this case. Repairing the damage and building taller barriers will cost Alyeska between $10 million and $15 million, Haines said.

The event comes as the North Slope is undergoing some major changes connected to global warming. The region has seen a temperature increase in the past half-century of more than 6 F — by far the largest of anywhere in Alaska.

 

Precipitation rose by 10 percent over the same period, and scientists expect those trends to continue. But Haines said Alyeska hasn’t observed effects on the pipeline that will force big-picture changes in the way the company handles the risk posed by the Sag River. And she added that the pipeline’s design for resisting floods was solid.

“Might we change it in the future? (We) might,” she said. “But it would go back to collecting the data, working it across the different industries and educational institutions, and really trying to draw through that analysis things that can be a little bit more substantiated or predictable.”

She added: “We don’t call it climate change or global warming. What we’re dealing with are hard facts, and from an engineering perspective, trying to understand those.”

Alyeska doesn’t deny that climate change is happening, and Haines said the company — owned by BP, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and UnoCal — has, over the past few years, put more effort into understanding what’s happening with the permafrost under areas of the pipeline. But she said it’s still too early to draw any conclusions.

The average flow in the Sag River, meanwhile, has been increasing. And the past two years were its highest on record.

But because there have long been large year-to-year swings in rain and snow on the North Slope, scientists say the recent increases aren’t enough to establish a “statistically significant” trend. The change could still be just random variation, said Rick Thoman, a climatologist at the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy.

“For temperatures, by any measure, those have increased beyond all doubt,” Thoman said. For precipitation, he added, “the noise, if you will, is large — much larger than with temperature. So, it takes a much stronger trend or over a much longer period of time.”

Flooding from the Sag River has caused damage in other spots along the pipeline corridor in recent years — most notably in 2015, when it forced the closure of the Dalton Highway used to haul supplies to the North Slope’s oil fields. The damage, according to reports at the time, stemmed from heavy rains the previous summer, a deep winter freeze and rapid spring thaw with record temperatures.

Research led by a scientist at the American Association for the Advancement of Science predicts climate change could cause more than $5 billion in damage to Alaska infrastructure.

Alyeska, which ships the fossil fuels that scientists say are the main driver of global warming, does not have a position on policy measures that could reduce carbon emissions, like the Paris climate agreement, Haines said.

Robin Brena made a fortune as an attorney fighting Alaska’s biggest oil companies. But for nearly three decades, he largely stayed away from politics, investing money in his commercial real estate business instead.

Then, in 2013, the Legislature passed an industry-supported rewrite of Alaska’s oil tax laws – with help from the votes of two senators employed by ConocoPhillips.

A year later, opponents of the measure tried to repeal the bill at the polls through a referendum, but they lost the public vote to a multi-million dollar, industry-backed campaign.

Brena, 64, supported the repeal effort and since then has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to like-minded political candidates, in hopes of getting what he describes as Alaska’s “fair share” in production taxes from the state’s largest oil-fields.

But that effort has so far failed to produce a tax overhaul, and a frustrated Brena is now chairing a citizens initiative to raise oil taxes. He’s also the effort’s top funder, contributing more than $100,000 so far.

“All you need for something bad to happen is the people that know better remain silent,” Brena said in an interview at his law office, inside a building owned by his real estate firm. “I’m an Alaskan first and foremost, and I’m going to stand up for Alaska. And I want to be sure that Alaska gets a fair deal for their oil.”

The initiative targets some of Alaska’s oldest and largest oil fields, and it would levy what Brena’s side estimates as an additional $1 billion in taxes on the state’s biggest producers: BP, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil.

Brena has made a career of battling those same companies in court.

In some of those cases, Brena represented the public, working for Alaska municipalities that were seeking more property tax revenue from the companies, which are the primary owners of the trans-Alaska pipeline.

But in other cases, Brena’s clients were actually oil companies. Among them was Tesoro, the large, independent oil refiner that was disputing fees the pipeline owners charged to ship crude from the North Slope to the port of Valdez, 800 miles away.

Between just those two areas of work, Brena won hundreds of millions of dollars from the owner companies for his clients. And his legal victories, according to friends, were also worth millions of dollars to Brena himself.

Now, Brena is taking that money and putting it into a fight against those same oil companies — this time at the ballot box.

“I believe Alaskans don’t know all the details perhaps, because they can’t be known,” Brena said. “Because we’re treated like mushrooms – you know, we’re kept in a dark room, and we’re fed cow manure.”

Brena’s work has won him praise from his clients, but it has not endeared him to the major players in Alaska’s oil industry.

Officials and attorneys currently working with those companies did not want to speak publicly about him. But Dick Rabinow, a former president of ExxonMobil’s pipeline company, described Brena as a persistent thorn in the industry’s side.

“It was pain, to deal with him,” Rabinow, who’s retired from the pipeline company, said in a phone interview from Houston.

Rabinow didn’t work with Brena directly. But he was familiar with his work, which directly affected ExxonMobil and the other companies.

The legal fights in Alaska that Brena was involved in extended over many years and an array of cases, which Rabinow said was different from the rest of the country. Arrangements between companies and landowners in the Lower 48 were more stable, Rabinow said.

In Alaska, “you think you’ve spent a lot of time and money to work something out,” Rabinow said. “And next year and the year after and the year after, people are coming back at you. It’s very frustrating, and it costs money.”

Brena, for his part, relished the opportunity to take on the major oil companies and their teams of lawyers in court. Many of the industry attorneys he litigated against were specialists from the Lower 48, and he described his experience as like “a farm boy given the chance to compete in the NBA.”

Brena grew up in the tiny Southeast Alaska gold rush town of Skagway, where his father ran a bar called the Pack Train Inn.

His father died when Brena was 12, and Brena worked on the White Pass & Yukon Railway to support his family, he said. The railroad was one of the town’s major industries, moving ore from mines in Canada to Skagway’s port.

“I started when I was 17, in high school, working as a janitor in the roundhouse,” he said. “If there’s a job on the railroad, I’ve done it.”

After high school, many of Brena’s friends worked construction on Alaska’s oil pipeline. Brena went to college, then spent a decade accumulating graduate degrees: a master’s of business and finance, a law degree and a master’s of real estate and finance law.

Then he started work as an attorney back in Alaska, and by the mid-1980s was working on complicated oil and gas litigation.

Ultimately, Brena got involved in a series of big cases against Alaska’s major oil companies, with proceedings before the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, state courts and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

As an attorney for the Fairbanks North Star Borough and the City of Valdez, Brena argued that the value of the pipeline, for property tax purposes, was billions of dollars more than its owners asserted. In one of a set of cases, a Superior Court judge set the pipeline’s value at $10 billion, more than 10 times the $850 million that the companies had asserted. The Alaska Supreme Court upheld the ruling.

In another set of cases, working for Tesoro, Brena successfully argued that the pipeline’s owners had charged “unjust, unreasonable” rates to ship oil from the North Slope to Valdez.

“When it comes to pipeline rate cases, there’s probably not a better lawyer on the planet than Robin Brena,” said Alaska Attorney General Kevin Clarkson, a former law partner of Brena’s. “The owners of the pipeline — those companies hired the best they could find, across the country, and they brought them to Alaska to litigate against Robin Brena. And he beat them every time.”

Those cases helped Brena build his real estate company, RSD Properties. The “R” is for Robin; the “S” and “D” are for the names of his children. All three letters are bolted to his law offices, as well as the downtown Anchorage building that houses the oil tax initiative’s headquarters.

RSD owns nine office buildings in Anchorage, and it’s now developing what’s called a “co-working” business, a type of shared workspace.

Over the past decade, though, Brena has also become increasingly involved in Alaska politics.

He’s contributed roughly $500,000 to state-level candidates and causes since 2012, according to public records. He was a major financial supporter of former independent Gov. Bill Walker. And after Walker, also an attorney, was elected governor in 2014, Brena bought Walker’s law firm.

Last year, after losing his re-election bid, Walker became a partner at Brena’s firm.

Brena and his friends describe the 2013 passage of Senate Bill 21 – the last major rewrite of Alaska’s oil tax regime – as a galvanizing moment. The bill passed the Legislature with votes from Republican state Sens. Peter Micciche of Soldotna and Kevin Meyer of Anchorage, both of whom worked for ConocoPhillips. Meyer is now lieutenant governor.

Brena calls the legislation a “giveaway,” and he said he was particularly frustrated by the millions of dollars that oil companies spent fighting the repeal campaign. The state’s current oil tax structure, he argues, doesn’t bring in enough money to sustain what he calls a “modern Alaska.”

Nonetheless, Brena says he’s pro-oil and pro-development, arguing that his work for Tesoro boosted the value of Alaska’s petroleum by reducing the fees charged by the pipeline owners for the shipment of oil.

Critics argue that Brena’s campaign ignores the downsides of higher taxes. Jason Grenn, a former Anchorage independent representative, said the oil tax initiative overlooks the risk of lower oil company investment, less oil production and fewer jobs.

“It’s painting a really great picture,” Grenn said. “But in six or seven years, if we have more job loss, more property taxes gone, that will hurt worse than any gains that will be brought through.”

Brena described himself as a counterweight to those arguments, which he’s worried will otherwise go unchallenged.

He wouldn’t say exactly how much he’ll ultimately spend on the initiative, in the face of what will likely be a multi-million dollar opposition campaign from Alaska’s major oil producers. Instead, he offered a hint: “My personal commitment to Alaskans is I’m going to do everything I can to give you a choice about your own future.”

Update (Jan. 29, 11:04 a.m.) — Andrew Kitchenman, KTOO and Alaska Public Media

Anchorage Superior Court Judge Eric Aarseth has once again issued a stay that halts the organization Recall Dunleavy from gathering signatures to hold a recall election, pending a decision from the Alaska Supreme Court. (Read more)

Original story

Anchorage Superior Court Judge Eric Aarseth, in his second reversal in two days, has taken back his order that paused the campaign to recall Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, with court system officials saying it was issued accidentally while Aarseth was out of town.

The ruling effectively ends a day-long timeout for the recall campaign, and will allow the group to to proceed to the signature-gathering phase of its effort, barring further action from Aarseth or intervention by the Alaska Supreme Court.

Aarseth is the lower court judge overseeing the case between the recall campaign and Dunleavy’s defenders, who are still fighting over whether the campaign’s basis for recall meets requirements set out in Alaska law.

State elections officials, relying on advice from Dunleavy’s attorney general, Kevin Clarkson, originally rejected the recall campaign’s grounds. But Recall Dunleavy sued, and Aarseth, in a decision earlier this month, said all but one part of the campaign’s four grounds for recall are legally sufficient.

Aarseth ordered the state to prepare the petitions that more than 71,000 Alaskans must sign in order to pose the recall question to voters. And he said the signature booklets should be issued to the recall campaign no later than Feb. 10.

Dunleavy’s defenders said they would appeal Aarseth’s decision to the Alaska Supreme Court. And Brewster Jamieson, an attorney for the anti-recall group Stand Tall With Mike, said he would also ask Aarseth for a stay, which would pause the effect of Aarseth’s ruling and block the state from issuing the recall petitions until the Alaska Supreme Court could review his decision.

But at the time, Aarseth said it was unlikely that he would grant Jamieson’s request.

Then, on Tuesday, without asking for counterarguments from the recall campaign, Aarseth granted Jamieson’s request. He issued a signed, stamped order that said: “This matter is stayed pending resolution of this case in the Alaska Supreme Court.”

That decision came as a surprise to the recall effort, said campaign manager Claire Pywell.

“Given Judge Aarseth’s very clear and very strong statement from the bench, it seemed like the two things were in conflict with one another,” she said.

Twenty-six hours later, on Wednesday morning, Aarseth issued a new order that was signed by a different judge on his behalf, saying the previous one was “inadvertently issued” and revoked. Late Wednesday, the Alaska Court System released a statement saying Aarseth had been out of town on an “urgent family issue” and, by phone, agreed to grant a separate motion from Jamieson that asked only for “expedited consideration” of the request for a stay.

The request for the stay itself, the statement added, “was inadvertently granted as well.”

Technically, Stand Tall With Mike’s request for the stay is now pending again, and Aarseth noted that he’d received the recall effort’s opposing brief that was filed after his ruling Tuesday. He asked Stand Tall With Mike to file its final reply by Thursday.

This story has been updated.

Prosecutors in Nevada have dismissed all charges against a former Alaska political consultant who was accused of assaulting his former fiancee.

Ben Sparks was campaign manager for U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan when Sullivan was elected in 2014. As a veteran Republican political consultant, Sparks’ case made national news two years ago when he was charged with kidnapping and domestic battery, and his ex-fiancee released a signed five-page sex contract that described her as Sparks’ “slave and property.”

Sullivan, at the time, called the allegations and reports “shocking and extremely disturbing.”

Prosecutors dismissed five of the felony charges against Sparks in October, but they said at the time that they wanted to pursue a misdemeanor battery charge against him.

Last week, prosecutors dropped that charge, too, saying Sparks’ ex-fiancee had become ill and wouldn’t be able to testify at trial for a long time, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

Sparks’ attorney told the newspaper that the allegations against him were fabricated.

The Regulatory Commission of Alaska, which is overseeing Hilcorp’s purchase of BP’s stake in the trans-Alaska pipeline, plans to hold a six-hour public hearing on the deal in February, denying a request by the companies to approve the transaction without one.

The commission announced the hearing Jan. 17, saying it had received public comments both supporting the deal, and registering concerns.

The hearing, scheduled for 3 p.m. Feb. 4 in downtown Anchorage, will “allow additional comment on the applications,” the RCA said in a one-page notice, signed by Chairman Robert Pickett.

BP and Hilcorp, in a written filing last month, had asked the RCA to approve the deal without holding a public hearing. The companies cited concerns about delays and said that the agency had not held hearings while scrutinizing other “major transactions.”

A BP spokeswoman, Meg Baldino, declined to comment. Hilcorp officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Related: Alaska utility regulators ask Hilcorp, BP for more details on $5.6B deal

U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason has rejected a legal challenge to the Trump administration’s approval of oil drilling and other industrial activity near Nuiqsut.

The North Slope village sits at the eastern edge of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, and it’s become increasingly surrounded by oil development.

The local Alaska Native village corporation, Kuukpik Corp., has negotiated deals with oil companies, and residents have been rewarded with cash payments and cheap natural gas for heating. But some residents say that they have growing concerns about the oil industry’s impacts on subsistence wildlife and air quality.

In March, Nuiqsut’s tribal government joined with five national environmental groups to sue the Bureau of Land Management. They alleged that the agency failed to perform an adequate environmental review of ConocoPhillips’ exploration work that was authorized for the previous winter, which included drilling at up to eight sites, building 100 miles of ice roads and snow trails, creating 23 ice pads and an airstrip and installing temporary housing

Gleason upheld the environmental review in a 73-page decision released Thursday. She ruled that the review did not violate the National Environmental Policy Act or the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, as the tribal government and environmental groups alleged.

BLM spokesperson Eric Tausch declined to comment. The tribal government’s administrator and ConocoPhillips officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.