The US Bureau of Land Management said it intends to conduct an environmental review for what would be the second oil and gas production well within the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
ConocoPhillips Alaska Inc. submitted in August 2015 an application for the Greater Mooses Tooth-2 (GMT-2) project, which would include a drill site, access road, pipelines, and other facilities, BLM’s Alaska State Office in Anchorage said on July 25.
It said the proposed project would be on BLM-managed land that has been selected for conveyance to Kuukpik Corp., an Alaska Native corporation organized under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
An associated pipeline and access road would cross both Kuukpik Corp. and BLM-managed public land within the 23 million-acre NPR-A and connect with the Greater Mooses Tooth-1 (GMT-1) development project that BLM finally approved in February 2015 (OGJ Online, Feb. 16, 2015), BLM’s Alaska office said.
The site is 8 miles southwest of GMT-1 and about 20 miles southwest of ConocoPhillips Alaska’s producing Alpine field on Alaska state land, it added. BLM originally analyzed the proposed development in its 2004 Alpine Satellite Development Plan (ASDP), and it also is subject to the 2012 NPR-A Integrated Activity Plan, which was approved in February 2013, the US Department of the Interior agency said.
BLM now will prepare a supplemental environmental impact statement to the ASDP to evaluate new circumstances and information, including changes to the project’s design, new data on climate change, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2008 listing of the polar bear as a threatened species, it indicated.
BLM Alaska said that a 30-day public comment period on the proposed draft supplemental EIS for GMT-2 will begin on July 29, when it is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register.
Contact Nick Snow at [email protected].
