The Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service is worried that three companies looking to explore oil and natural gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge aren’t doing enough to account for the risks of conducting seismic testing in the region, which has been protected from exploration for more than three decades.
The agency said the application, obtained by the Washington Post, showed “a lack of applicable details for proper agency review” and “impinges on the beginning of the calving and nesting season of wildlife using this area.”
“Such responses are part of a normal, iterative process whereby we work collaboratively with both the applicant and our sister federal agencies to identify shortcomings or gaps in information in the application so that we can fully and appropriately evaluate it,” Gavin Shire, a Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman, told the Washington Examiner.
The seismic permit application was filed by Kuukpik Corp., a joint group consisting of SAExploration, the Arctic Slope Regional Corp. and the Kaktovik Inupiat Corp.
A spokeswoman for the Alaska office of the Bureau of Land Management confirmed to the Washington Examiner it received the seismic application and is “reviewing” it.
ANWR was created under President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960. In 1980, Congress provided additional protections to the 19 million-acre refuge but set aside a 1.5 million-acre section known as the “1002 area,” where billions of barrels of crude oil are believed to lie beneath the coastal plain, for study and future drilling if lawmakers approved it.
Republicans last year were successful in achieving their goal to allow energy exploration in the area as part of their tax overhaul legislation.
Under the tax law, the Interior Department must hold the first lease sale by 2021 and another by 2024, and offer up at least 400,000 acres each time.
But the seismic application proposes to study all of the 1.5 million acres, not the smaller portion that the GOP tax law allows drilling in, angering environmental groups.
“This is the polar opposite of what was promised by drilling proponents,” said Adam Kolton, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League. “Instead of a small footprint and a careful process, they want to deploy a small army of industrial vehicles and equipment with a mandate to crisscross every square inch of the refuge’s biological heart.”
Last month, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management published a notice of its intent to do a draft environmental impact statement for energy leasing in ANWR, opening a 60-day comment period.
Republican lawmakers representing Alaska, and Interior officials, have said they hope to have a lease sale as soon as next year, ahead of the timeline outlined in the law allowing drilling in ANWR.
