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Alaska calls for comment on second N. Slope area-wide state sale

Aug. 24, 1998

Alaska's Proposed North Slope Areawide Sale [93,108 bytes] Alaska has issued a call for new information regarding its proposal to offer all available state acreage in a North Slope area-wide oil and gas lease sale in 1999. Alaska's Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Division of Oil and Gas (DOG), is seeking input about the region affected after issuing a finding on Mar. 17, 1998, that proceeding with the sale is in the state's best interest.

Alaska's Proposed North Slope Areawide Sale [93,108 bytes]

Alaska has issued a call for new information regarding its proposal to offer all available state acreage in a North Slope area-wide oil and gas lease sale in 1999.

Alaska's Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Division of Oil and Gas (DOG), is seeking input about the region affected after issuing a finding on Mar. 17, 1998, that proceeding with the sale is in the state's best interest.

The sale is tentatively scheduled for February 1999. The comment period closes Sept. 21, 1998. Should DNR determine whether there is substantial new information that has become available since the Mar. 17 finding, it would issue a supplement to that finding 90 days prior to the sale.

DOG is seeking information about: fish and wildlife; current and projected uses of the proposed sale area, including subsistence and recreation; potential geophysical hazards within the proposed sale area; archaeological sites and historic places; characteristics of local communities within the sale area; air and water quality; and reasonably foreseeable effects of leasing on subsistence and other uses, on municipalities and communities and on the environment.

What's offered

The 1999 North Slope area-wide sale offering, the second such sale, covers a gross area of about 5.1 million acres, divided into 1,225 tracts of 640-5,760 acres.

All tracts are within the North Slope Borough. The sale area extends from the Canning River and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the east to the Colville River delta and National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska in the west, and from the Umiat Meridian baseline in the south to a set-back fringe area along the Beaufort Sea coast in the north.

The first area-wide sale of North Slope state leases garnered more than $55 million in apparent high bids for 558,000 acres on June 24 this year. It was Alaska's first area-wide sale. It was the biggest sale of state acreage, in dollar terms, since state Lease Sale 23 netted $900 million in 1969.