Alaska's senior senator yesterday said she will fight for additional funding to clean up more than 100 abandoned oil and gas wells in her state, calling the federal government's response to this point "absolutely insufficient, inadequate and an embarrassment."

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she will use her leverage as ranking member of the Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee to ensure that the Bureau of Land Management has the resources it needs to remediate wells drilled, but abandoned, by the federal government over the past several decades in the National Petroleum Reserve.

"This is the type of crime the federal government would fine a private company millions of dollars for," Murkowski said at a hearing yesterday before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where lawmakers heard from federal and Alaska officials.

"But since these wells were drilled and are owned by a federal agency, they are allowed to willfully ignore the law," said Murkowski, the ranking member of the committee. "Only the federal government could get away with this."

Most of the 136 "legacy wells" were drilled by the Navy before the 22-million-acre reserve in northwest Alaska was transferred to the Interior Department. The U.S. Geological Survey drilled an additional 27 wells between 1976 and 1982, 18 of which are partially plugged and used by the agency for climate change monitoring.

Over the past decade, BLM said it has spent $86 million to plug and remediate 18 legacy wells and that an additional 24 have been transferred out of federal ownership.

An additional 34 wells are uncased or partially cased boreholes that will be reclaimed naturally, BLM said. The agency plans to ask the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to remove those from the list of legacy wells.

The agency said it continues to monitor the remaining 41 wells and plans to remediate roughly a dozen more wells over the next three years.

"I think we have done a very excellent job in the work we've done up to this point," said Bud Cribley, BLM's state director in Alaska.

Murkowski and two witnesses representing the state disagreed, arguing that BLM has failed to properly plug some of the wells and has yet to convince AOGCC that uncased holes are safe.

"The remaining 120 wells are in various conditions of flagrant noncompliance," said state Rep. Charisse Millett (R). "Allowing these unsafe and unsightly wells to litter Alaska wilderness while threatening wildlife and human safety and damaging the pristine Arctic environment is unacceptable."

Cathy Foerster, chairwoman of AOGCC, said two wells are leaking greenhouse gases, although in small amounts. At least 17 wells are filled with diesel, three can no longer be found and 29 are partially covered with vegetation but have unknown down-hole conditions, "making them land mines," she said.

BLM in 2004 issued a report, however, that found only eight represent a threat to human health, safety and the environment if left in their current condition. Some of those have since been capped.

'An issue that cries out for an earmark'

Most at the hearing agreed that future remediation will be expensive.

Cribley said each well costs $1.4 million to $25 million to clean up, due in large part to the high cost of transporting equipment into the reserve, which has virtually no roads and is only accessible in winter. The agency receives about $1 million a year for legacy well management.

"This is an issue that cries out for an earmark," said committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.).

Murkowski, who flew to Alaska last summer with Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chairman of the Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee, said she may seek language in the fiscal 2013 spending bill directing BLM to "appropriately prioritize the importance of cleaning up these legacy wells."

"It demonstrates to me the real quagmire we're in when we say there's no allowance for an earmark," Murkowski told E&E Daily following the hearing. "As the chairman himself has said, this is a situation that just begs for directed congressional funding."

Millett proposed that BLM use a portion of the $9.4 billion the government has raised through oil and gas lease sales in Alaska to clean up the remaining wells.

Such a move would take an act of Congress, however, as current law sends federal revenues directly to the U.S. Treasury, leaving appropriators to decide exactly what returns to the BLM budget.

While there were no easy answers, Murkowski and others said yesterday's hearing was a chance to highlight what they called a double standard.

"Why is the government allowed to be treated differently than the private sector?" asked Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). "If this had been a private company ... what do you think EPA would have done?"

And while BLM says it doesn't have the money to remediate the wells, Murkowski said she has a "difficult time reconciling that with the fact that the Interior Department continues to seek increases to the Land and Water Conservation Fund to purchase more private land."

Foerster, of AOGCC, said that although she can't fine the federal government, "all we can do is embarrass them in the court of public opinion."