The Trump administration is planning to pare down environmental reviews of oil and gas exploration activities over the winter in parts of Alaska’s North Slope.
As part of the administration’s push to speed oil and gas production, officials at the Interior Department plan to issue a categorical exclusion for winter seismic testing and other exploration activities in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. The move could potentially mean skipping a public comment period and declining to examine the environmental effects that shock waves, ice roads, airstrips and drilled wells could have on sensitive Arctic tundra ecosystems.
The potential for a categorical exclusion in the NPR-A was first reported by Public Domain.
An Interior spokesperson said Wednesday that the department is “working on a proposed categorical exclusion to speed up permitting for winter exploration, including seismic and exploratory drilling operations.”
While energy projects and other infrastructure that intersect with federal land generally require environmental analyses under the National Environmental Policy Act, officials can designate certain categories of activities as unlikely to cause significant environmental harm and therefore subject to abbreviated reviews. These are known as categorical exclusions.
“That effort builds on what the BLM has learned from dozens of environmental reviews for winter exploration in the area: when conducted under established operating procedures and mitigation measures, those activities result in no significant impacts,” the spokesperson said.
More than half a dozen oil and gas companies own leases in the more than 22-million-acre Alaska reserve and could potentially benefit from a categorical exclusion. The major producer in the region is ConocoPhillips, owner of the planned Willow project approved during the Biden administration. Others that own leases include Borealis Alaska Oil, North Slope Exploration and Oil Search. The companies could not be reached for comment.
Recent Democratic administrations have sought to protect much of the NPR-A from development, while the Trump administration reopened more than 80 percent of the reserve to leasing. In March, a lease sale brought in a record $163 million with winning bids from companies including Exxon, Shell and Beacon Land Management. The companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Last December, the Bureau of Land Management, an Interior agency, approved winter seismic activity in the NPR-A by ConocoPhillips, which is currently the only company producing from the reserve. This included a seismic survey of more than 300 square miles, four winter exploratory drilling wells, clean up of two existing wells and building ice roads, airstrips and ice pads that involve hundreds of employees.
The construction of ice roads and seismic survey also included pumping water and collecting snow from nearby lakes, according to a final environmental assessment.
Dennis Nuss, a company spokesperson, said that ConocoPhillips “supports efforts to create a more predictable permitting process in the NPR-A while maintaining appropriate environmental protections and mitigation measures.”
In January, an oil rig being transported in the NPR-A for use in the company’s winter exploration fell over and spilled thousands of gallons of diesel onto the tundra.
Environmentalists have long been concerned about the harms such activities can have on species like polar bears, caribou, grizzly bears and migratory birds.
“As the cleanup continues for an oil rig accident this past winter, this proposal to ignore impacts for exploration drilling and seismic in the NPR-A is simply mind boggling,” Andy Moderow, senior director of policy for the Alaska Wilderness League, said in an email. “When the government authorizes activities on public lands like towing 200-person worker camps across the tundra with bulldozers, pumping water out of lakes with fish to build ice roads, or thumping the tundra with 15-ton trucks in critical caribou habitat during the dark of winter, it should analyze impacts closely, not ignore them.”
The Trump administration has pushed to significantly cut down on environmental reviews for oil and gas and mining projects around the country.
The Council on Environmental Quality, the White House’s environmental policy office, has rescinded NEPA regulations across the government, and various departments have pushed officials to expand the application of categorical exclusions.