North Slope

An environmental group has published 18 memos by government scientists that outline gaps in knowledge about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The group claims the information should have been included in the Bureau of Land Management’s report on possible impacts from oil and gas leasing in the refuge.

“We are concerned that there are indications that BLM is rushing the process,” said Tim Whitehouse, director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

Whitehouse said PEER got the memos from confidential sources concerned the Department of the Interior is “flying blind” as it prepares to open ANWR to development.

The public comment period for the draft environmental impact statement on lease sales in the refuge ends Wednesday. Whitehouse said the agencies should have owned up in the document to the gaps in its knowledge.

“That information should have been provided in a draft EIS in a very clear, transparent way,” Whitehouse said.

But the Interior Department said the memos are intended to inform future work and haven’t been concealed.

The 18 memos, written last year, detail many areas where government scientists say more research is needed. The subjects include caribou movements, how noise would affect wildlife and how much water can be spared for industrial use before it compromises fish in the refuge.

The head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska said in a written statement that none of his agency’s science concerns were suppressed by the BLM or their parent agency, the Interior Department.

Assistant Interior Secretary Joe Balash said the department requested the memos to help identify information it will need for the full range of activities in the refuge beyond the leasing stage. The environmental process for the lease sale doesn’t authorize any activity on the ground to advance exploration or development, Balash said in a written statement. More environmental review will be required for site-specific proposals, Balash wrote.

PEER also claims Interior failed to provide the memos to people who requested such information under the Freedom of Information Act.

Balash said Interior isn’t “hiding” documents and is still processing FOIA requests related to ANWR.

Drilling opponents watch the environmental process carefully, looking for defects that could lead to a legal challenge that halts development in the refuge.

Former Interior Deputy Secretary David Hayes thinks he may have found one. Hayes said the Interior Department may be going through the environmental process in the wrong order. He said Interior should prepare a review of the oil and gas program for the refuge — the area-wide plan — before it prepares the lease sale.

“If they’re doing that, I think they’re making a potentially fatal error,” Hayes said. “They need to have an EIS for the program. They can’t do leasing without setting up a program first.”

Hayes worked in the Obama administration and now runs the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at NYU School of Law. He said his opinion is based on his reading of the 2017 law Congress passed to open the refuge.

Other experts aren’t sure a program-level environmental review is required in this case.

The North Slope Borough, which covers a huge swath of Alaska north of Fairbanks, runs on oil: The government pays for more than 90 percent of its annual budget with taxes on oil and gas infrastructure.

Which is why, when Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration unveiled a proposal last month to take away that taxing power and instead send that money to the state, borough officials were outraged. The plan — part of Dunleavy’s budget proposal — would add some $370 million to the state’s bottom line, while blowing a $370 million hole in the borough’s own $400 million budget.

“We use this revenue generated from our lands for schools, fire, police, infrastructure, erosion and subsistence protection, search and rescue, health care and transportation,” Harry K. Brower Jr., the borough mayor, wrote in a statement after the proposal was made public. “Frankly speaking, this isn’t fair and it’s not right.”

But Dunleavy administration officials said that the borough already benefits disproportionately from oil and gas revenues. And they justified their proposal, in part, by pointing to a second source of borough oil revenue that the state expects to sharply rise in the next decade.

That second source is the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, or NPR-A, where several significant projects are under development.

Dunleavy’s plan has gotten little traction in Juneau so far. But lawmakers and political observers said they see the proposal as an opening move in what’s like to grow into a broad debate about the division of the North Slope’s oil revenues — a debate driven by the anticipated sharp increase in those revenues, and by the state’s own budget crunch.

The discussion gets at a longstanding question: How much money from oil should stay in the North Slope, where it’s pumped from lands the Iñupiat have lived on for generations? And how much should be shared to pay for government services across the entire state?

NPR-A is an Indiana-sized swath of federal land in the western part of the North Slope. It was designated as a federal petroleum reserve in 1923, but it wasn’t until 2015 that oil was first produced there. It’s now a hot new area for oil development, with three new projects — Willow, and Greater Moose’s Tooth 1 and 2 — being pushed by ConocoPhillips.

Federal law directs half of the government’s royalty share of oil produced in the reserve to the state of Alaska. But there are limits on where that money can go: The law says that areas of Alaska “most directly or severely impacted” by development in the reserve get priority.

Right now that’s a handful of municipalities on the North Slope: The borough, as well as the cities of Nuiqsut, Wainwright, Utqiaġvik, Anaktuvuk Pass and Atqasuk. Alaska law allows those municipalities to apply for grants from the state’s NPR-A fund, and the state can keep money that remains after grants have been made to those communities.

Since it’s only recently that companies have been developing projects in the reserve, annual revenues over the past decade have topped out at $16 million. But with Conoco’s first project finished and a second under construction, the state is forecasting NPR-A revenues that could peak at $316 million a year in 2029. (That depends on oil prices of $80 a barrel; at $50 a barrel, peak annual revenue is projected to be $171 million.)

That could generate combined royalty and property tax revenues for the North Slope Borough, and its villages, of $700 million a year — or $70,000 for each of their 10,000 residents. Dunleavy administration officials, in a phone interview, said they think that’s too much.

“The question legislators need to ask themselves: Is that fair to the rest of the state?” said Jeremy Price, a deputy chief of staff to Dunleavy. “We would argue that is not fair.”

The state already collects substantial oil revenue in the form of production taxes and royalties — nearly $2.5 billion in the past fiscal year. But production tax revenue is volatile, and Alaska’s petroleum revenue is down substantially from years when oil production and prices were higher — in 2013, it was $7.5 billion.

That means the borough’s share of all the oil revenue collected in the state has grown, since it relies on property taxes, which are much more stable. Still, borough officials said they need the cash to sustain their own government programs.

“This would destroy the North Slope Borough. We’d be done,” said D.J. Fauske, the borough’s director of government and external affairs.

Fauske said the borough’s $400 million budget might seem like a lot for its small population. But, he added, it’s expensive to support people in eight Arctic villages, where most supplies have to be barged or flown in.

The borough uses its money to provide government services — police, public works, search and rescue — that the state handles in some other rural areas.

Fauske also noted that North Slope villages face expensive problems that road system communities don’t, like coastal erosion tied to climate change. One project to protect the coastline near the North Slope village of Utqiaġvik will cost $300 million, with $100 million needed from the borough, according to a federal estimate.

Then there’s the fact that the oil itself comes from the North Slope, and that local tax revenue gives residents a stake in the industry’s success. Fauske suggested that diverting more of that revenue to the state could turn the borough against new development, like in NPR-A or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“Our support of oil and gas development on the North Slope has always been and still is contingent upon such activities providing a benefit to our residents,” Fauske said.

Fauske also argued that it’s still uncertain how much cash will materialize from Conoco’s new projects, calling some of the numbers the state has cited “pie in the sky.” Until those numbers get more firm, borough officials said, it’s too early to have a conversation about how the NPR-A money should be divided.

In Juneau, Dunleavy’s proposal to redistribute property tax revenue appears to have stalled.

But borough officials said they’re concerned that the governor’s attempt to revoke the borough’s taxing authority is an opening salvo, and that ultimately, lawmakers outside the borough will seek a larger share of the NPR-A money, as well.

In a Feb. 5 letter to Alaska’s Congressional delegation in Washington, D.C., Brower, the mayor, said he heard that lawmakers in Juneau were pursuing changes to federal and state law to limit North Slope communities’ share of the NPR-A revenue.

The delegation, Brower said, should “summarily reject” that idea.

No concrete plan to reallocate NPR-A funding has emerged publicly. But a similar debate around the sharing of oil revenue from the reserve popped up at the Capitol in the mid-2000s, when the state was also facing tight budgets. And longtime observers of Alaska politics said that as revenues from NPR-A grow, the debate over where the money goes is likely to intensify, too.

“If the state’s finances are still tight, if the pain from budget cuts is still excruciating, you’re going to have a lot of people looking at this pot of money and saying, ‘Well, gee, I want some of that,’” said Larry Persily, a former deputy state revenue commissioner.

Sen. John Coghill, R-North Pole, said he’s interested in having a discussion about how the money is shared. But he wants it to be cooperative, he added.

“The governor has opened up the conversation, and it’s a proper conversation to have,” he said. “But the posture that I think you’ll see the Senate take is, ‘Okay, what’s fair? How do we all work with this as a state? How do we take care of the North Slope but make sure that the rest of Alaska isn’t left behind?’”

The state is deepening its investigation into what caused several accidents at Prudhoe Bay wells operated by oil company BP.

In a recent order, the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a state oil and gas watchdog agency, said BP “has no evidence that permafrost subsidence will not result in sudden catastrophic failure” at other Prudhoe Bay wells.

The first accident happened in 2017, when a well at Prudhoe Bay jumped up, hit the top of the wellhouse and started spewing oil and gas. It leaked for days before it was stopped. Both the state and BP investigated the incident and linked it to thawing permafrost and the well’s design.

BP’s theory was that the only wells at risk were of a certain design; there’s a relatively small number of those wells at Prudhoe Bay. BP told the state 14 such wells were at risk and they were all shut in.

But in December, there was another accident at one of the 14 at-risk wells, and the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission required another investigation.

After hearing testimony from BP, the commission issued an order last week stating the company has not proven that thawing permafrost won’t lead to more accidents at wells with a more common design, which accounts for most of the 1,800 wells at Prudhoe Bay.

Cathy Foerster, who sits on the state commission, said while there’s no evidence either way, the commission wants to be proactive.

“That’s why we’re ordering BP to gather additional data on those wells so we can gain an understanding of whether or not there is a risk associated with those wells also,” Foerster said.

“We haven’t had anything to cause us to believe that they do have a risk, but we just want to make sure they don’t,” she added.

Among other things, the state is requiring BP to pull up oil well parts, like production tubing and casing, from deep underground to analyze what might have caused the accidents.

The commission is also requiring the 14 wells BP previously said were at risk to be not just shut in, but plugged and abandoned — meaning they won’t produce oil ever again.

According to BP, those 14 wells are being monitored in real time and their flowlines and wellhouses have been removed to prevent future accidents. BP has also proposed plugging and abandoning four additional wells next year, on top if the state’s requirements.

In an emailed statement, BP spokesperson Megan Baldino said the company is working with the state to comply with the order and “remains committed to operating Prudhoe Bay in a safe, reliable and compliant manner.”

Lois Epstein, an engineer with The Wilderness Society, said it’s worrying the state doesn’t know exactly what’s going on.

“When a regulatory agency says there can be a ‘sudden catastrophic failure’ – and that’s the language they use – that’s of great concern,” Epstein said. “If I were working on the Slope near any one of these wells, I would want to know that. I would want to know why there is so much uncertainty.”

BP’s theory is that the heat of fluids in the wells was causing the permafrost to thaw. But now that the state is expanding the investigation, Epstein said she thinks it’s important to look at other potential risks, like permafrost thaw linked to climate change.

BP has been taking measurements to better understand permafrost thaw at Prudhoe Bay since 2011.

For hundreds of years, dog teams powered long-distance travel in northern Alaska.

Of course, now snowmachines, planes and cars have pretty much taken over the job of getting people around the North Slope.

But in Utqiaġvik, there’s still one dog team left, and their musher has been getting around the tundra by dogsled for more than 30 years.

It’s a beautiful afternoon with an orange sun blazing low in the blue sky, as Geoff Carroll and his 13-year-old helper Asa Elavgak wade into the dog yard to get the dogs hooked up to the sled. The dogs are yelping with excitement, and in its eagerness, one almost hauls Elavgak off his feet.

“So if you lift them up like this,” Carroll says, lifting one of the dogs by its harness so only its back feet are on the ground, “you get ‘em in two-wheel drive instead of four-wheel drive.”

This advice only gets Elavgak so far. By the time he gets the dog over to the sled, he’s winded.

“Asa needs to get a little bit bigger to handle these dogs,” Geoff jokes.

“Yup!” Elavgak agrees with a laugh.

After all the dogs are linked up to the line, Carroll stands on the back of the sled and shouts “KIITA!” (which means “let’s go” in Iñupiaq) and we’re off.

Suddenly, everything goes quiet — at least where the dogs are concerned. The only sounds are the squeaking of the snow, the creaking of the sled and the occasional thumps as we barrel over a mound or divot in the terrain.

We pass through the space between houses, across residential streets, and head out over the tundra and frozen lagoons north of town.

“Bouncing over the sastrugi,” Carroll narrates as we rattle over wind-sculpted grooves of snow, the afternoon sun throwing our shadow against the white.

“About as pretty as anything gets, as far as I’m concerned,” Carroll says, absorbing the scene. “The wide open country and sun shining on the horizon, and all those beautiful colors in the clouds.”

Alaska is, of course, famous for its sled dog racing, but that’s never been where Carroll’s interest lies. He’s an expedition guy.

In fact, his introduction to mushing was on an expedition to the North Pole in 1986: Known as the Steger International Polar Expedition, it was a 56-day, 1,000 mile trek over sea ice by dogsled.

The trip was a tough one, says Carroll, with rough ice conditions that made for slow-going, and temperatures down to 70 below zero. But it left him with enormous respect for sled dogs. As he puts it, he got hooked. And within a year, Carroll had his own dog team.

Since then it’s been a passion of his, though never his day job. He moved up to Utqiaġvik the same year he was introduced to mushing, though he’d been working up there seasonally for about a decade already on bowhead whale surveys. He then spent 27 years as a biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, a job he retired from a few years ago.

Over his time living in Alaska’s far north, he’s done dozens of multi-day trips and visited almost all of the North Slope villages.

“You can head out the back door and mush 200 miles to Umiat and Anaktuvuk (Pass) or whatever,” he says.”Not a single road or power line or anything between here and there.”

I ask Carroll if he’s ever gotten lost.

“Gotten lost? Oh I used to be lost all the time before they invented GPS,” he says.

When Carroll says “lost,” what he means is that he only had a vague sense of where he was; he never got lost in a dangerous way. Nowadays he uses GPS to navigate, but back in the mid-1980s, when he was new on the North Slope, he didn’t have that option.

“When I first moved here, I figured out pretty quick that the only way you could really get out and see the country and do things was to find an elder that would take you along,” he recounts.

He says the elders he went out with knew the country so well, they could leave their houses and make a beeline straight for a hunting camp fifty miles from town without a compass.

“You could never figure out how in the world they could do that in this country without a lot of landmarks and things,” he says.

As we bump across the snow, Carroll describes some of the more memorable things he’s seen from this sled over the decades: the surprising sharpness of the dogs’ shadows in the moonlight, for example, and what a bunch of caribou looks like when you suddenly find yourself in the middle of it.

“Oh it’s just total chaos,” says Carroll. “The dogs don’t know what to do, the caribou don’t know what to do, and you’re all kind of moving along there in unison. Pretty cool.”

Carroll is the first to admit that dog mushing is not a very practical way to get around. You have to feed the dogs, take care of them, hook them up to the sled, put them back in their pen. With a snowmachine, on the other hand, you gas it up and you go. When I ask him why he’s the only one left in Utqiaġvik with a dog team, he says he’s not as pragmatic as most people.

Not that pragmatic, sure, but for Carroll, running dogs is about a lot more than getting somewhere. He loves the quiet of traveling by sled, and he loves the animals.

“I get to go out and run with … my six best friends,” he says. “Go out and run across the country, you know. They love it. I love it.”

He also says that it’s taught him some valuable life lessons.

“You learn a lot of patience,” he says. “You know, just kinda keep plugging away, plugging away and you get there eventually … Pretty good strategy for life, too. You just keep at it and, you know, if you really believe in what you’re doing, you make some progress towards it someday.”

Carroll says he would love to see dog sledding continue in Utqiaġvik after he retires from it. He’s given mushing lessons to both kids and adults over the years, but says he’s always looking for new people (who think they might enjoy a bit of non-pragmatic tundra travel) to share it with.

The tribal government for a North Slope village near a growing number of oil projects is suing the federal government over its approval of ConocoPhillips’ plans to drill more wells nearby. The complaint was submitted Thursday in federal court.

Along with five environmental groups, the Native Village of Nuiqsut is challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s approval of ConocoPhillips’ exploratory drilling program this winter in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

“The impacts outweigh the benefits and don’t address the concerns of the community, so we’re filing this lawsuit to get the impacts and concerns fully analyzed for responsible development,” said Native Village of Nuiqsut tribal administrator Martha Itta. “We’re trying to fully understand and adapt to the fast-paced changes of our environment and impacts from being surrounded by the drilling rigs and oil industry.”

ConocoPhillips has already started this winter’s drilling program and plans to complete six to eight wells. If successful, the lawsuit could require the federal government to perform a tougher environmental review process for future oil exploration activities in NPR-A.

The groups argue BLM should have completed a full environmental impact statement before approving Conoco’s plans. In December, BLM completed an environmental assessment, a less involved version of an environmental review, and determined Conoco’s drilling program would have “no new significant impacts.”

The groups disagree, saying ConocoPhillips’s drilling plans threaten caribou that migrate near the village. People in Nuiqsut rely heavily on subsistence hunting.

The environmental groups that are also involved in the lawsuit are the Alaska Wilderness League, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club.

In a statement, the environmental groups said the federal government “acted irresponsibly and illegally by allowing this escalation and intrusion of industrial activity into this area without even the pretense of meaningful analysis of the impacts of this action or consideration of less harmful alternatives.”

BLM completed an overarching environmental impact statement for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska in 2013. The Trump administration is now redoing that plan and could potentially open up more land in NPR-A to oil development.

ConocoPhillips already operates several drill sites and an oil processing facility not far from Nuiqsut. The company has made significant oil discoveries nearby in recent years.

Nuiqsut’s village corporation, Kuukpik Corporation, said in a statement it “continues to support balanced and environmentally responsible, feasible development.”

Because the litigation is pending, both BLM and ConocoPhillips declined to comment.

The federal agency reviewing Alaska’s ambitious North-Slope-to-Asia LNG export project has pushed back the timeline for finishing that review.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, announced on Feb. 28 that it has pushed back the deadline for its final decision by four months.

“The new schedule indicates that the final permit for the Alaska LNG project will be delivered in June of 2020,” said Alaska Gasline Development Corporation spokesperson Tim Fitzpatrick.

In its notice, staff at FERC attributed the delay to the state’s gasline corporation. The corporation has filed hundreds of thousands of pages of environmental and engineering data to the federal agency — all in the quest to get that final permit to build the 800-mile long pipeline and plant.

But the federal commission is still waiting for information on everything from fire safety and underwater pipeline crossings to maps showing seismic hazards near the pipeline.

A final decision from the federal commission is contingent upon the state corporation providing all of the data that it wants — so the schedule could still be revised.

The $43 billion project has seen some upheaval in the last few months. Negotiations with potential buyers and investors in China were scheduled to end in December. That deadline passed with no deal.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy took office and then shook up the corporation’s board. That board then fired the corporation’s president in January.

Dunleavy’s budget team also wants to claw back about $5 million given to the state corporation last year.