US Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alas.) urged the US Bureau of Land Management to rescind its draft regional mitigation strategy (DRMS) for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska because it is deeply flawed, fails to establish predictability and transparency, and reflects a disregard for comments the state of Alaska and others provided previously.
"Mitigation can be a useful measure for resource development," she said in a Dec. 29, 2016, letter to BLM Alaska State Director Bud Cribley. "However, the concerns I have raised here are similar to ones I raised during the issuance of the 2015 memorandum and in the two hearings I conducted addressing mitigation issues during the 114th Congress." Murkowski chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
The concerns reaffirm that mitigation policy modification steps that BLM is taking on federally managed land in Alaska "are on the wrong track, will do more harm than good, and should be rescinded," she said.
BLM's record of decision, when it approved ConocoPhillips Alaska Inc.'s application to begin drilling its first well in the Greater Moose's Tooth crude oil project in NPR-A's northeastern section, incorporated a package of mitigation requirements (OGJ Online, Oct. 22, 2015).
These included a contribution from ConocoPhillips Alaska into a compensatory mitigation fund to offset identified impacts, including major impacts to subsistence uses that cannot be fully mitigated by avoidance or minimization, the agency said when it announced that it was establishing the mitigation strategy.
It said it was using "a transparent, stakeholder-driven process to identify projects or other measures that will offset unavoidable impacts to subsistence uses that cannot be fully mitigated by established avoidance and minimization measures and best management practices."
The strategy will serve as a roadmap for mitigating impacts from the GMT1 project, as well as future projects enabled or assisted by the ConocoPhillips project's existence, BLM said. It accepted comments on the draft for 90 days ending Dec. 30.
Murkowski said that the DRMS's proposed strategy is deeply flawed because it "seeks to address conditional impacts resulting from hypothetical development and requires advanced compensation for the sustainability and enhancement of environmental conditions." It also fails to establish predictability and transparency, which US President Barack Obama said would be key elements of updated mitigation policies, she said.
"The DRMS fails to account for existing, ongoing mitigation measures, and lacks any direction on how to navigate the multitude of plans, processes, and overlapping federal requirements relating to mitigation," the senator stated.
