US Rep. Raul M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the House Natural Resources Committee’s ranking minority member, and the top Democrats on two of the committee’s subcommittees urged the US Bureau of Land Management to maintain critical wildlife and caribou habitat protections near Teshekpuk Lake on Alaska’s North Slope. A new ConocoPhillips master plan targets the area for aggressive development despite existing restrictions, they said in a Sept. 20 letter to BLM Deputy Director Brian Steed.
The protections are contained in the 2013 Integrated Activity Plan (IAP) for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, noted Grijalva and Reps. Alan Lowenthal (Calif.) from the Energy and Mineral Resources Committee, and Jared Huffman (Calif.) from the Water, Power, and Oceans Subcommittee. BLM’s Alaska state office announced on Aug. 7 that it was preparing an environmental impact statement for the Willow Master Development Plan that ConocoPhillips has submitted for a prospect within the NPR-A’s Bear Tooth unit.
“We are particularly concerned about the proposal within the Willow Plan to construct roads and drill pads near the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area, including a drill pad within the Teshekpuk Lake Caribou Habitat Area,” the House Democrats said in their letter.
Congress specifically mandated special protections for Teshekpuk Lake and other special areas in the 1976 Naval Petroleum Reserves Protection Act due to Teshekpuk Lake’s importance to migratory birds and other waterfowl, they said. “Because of this, the IAP, which was developed through an extensive public planning process spanning more than 2 years…close the majority of the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area to leasing and other development activities,” the lawmakers said.
They said their letter was prompted in part by Assistant Interior Sec. for Land and Minerals Management Joe Balash’s comments in August that a “redeveloped” IAP “will make millions more acres available for leasing.”
They said, “This is completely unnecessary, as demonstrated by the lackluster results of the December 2017 lease sale in the reserve, where the oil and gas industry bid on less than 1% of the acreage offered for lease. The balance of conservation and development embodied in the 2013 IAP should not be undermined so [US Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke] can tout another largest ever lease sale (OGJ Online, Sept. 10, 2018).”
They said, “Leasing and development decisions in the fragile wilderness of the Arctic need to be made carefully, not rushed to meet arbitrary deadlines laid out in Secretarial Order 3355. A massive satellite drill pads, dozens of miles of roads, an airstrip, a new gravel mine, and a new artificial island offshore, among other features, requires a robust and thorough environmental analysis, not a truncated, 1-year/300-page limit.”