When Kay Brown was director of the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas in the 1980s, her job was to make sure the state got the maximum benefit from its abundant fossil fuel.
At the time, North Slope activity was on the rise and Alaska was on its way to supplying 25% of the nation’s domestically produced oil.
Now the producing oil fields are mature, Alaska production is down to less than a quarter of its late-1980s peak and climate change impacts have become dramatic in the state and elsewhere in the far north.
And Brown, who went on to become a state legislator and leader of the Alaska Democratic party, is among a group of environmentalists urging the federal and state governments to prepare for an eventual end to North Slope oil production and transit through the pipeline.
She is now Arctic policy director for Pacific Environment, one of six groups that on June 12 submitted a petition to the Department of the Interior for an environmental study of ways to phase out Alaska oil production.
“I’ve done a 180 in my thinking about the value of oil and gas in the state of Alaska,” Brown said in an interview. “Clearly, we’ve had a good run and made a lot of money for a lot of people, including the public treasury, and provided a lot of public services with it.”
However, with all the emerging information about fossil fuels’ role in climate change, she said, she is certain that oil’s position in the world economy will decline, and that Alaska should plan accordingly.
The petition that Pacific Environment and the other groups filed with the Department of the Interior targets the 2034 deadline for renewal of the federal right-of-way permit that allows the trans-Alaska oil pipeline to operate.
The department’s Bureau of Land Management, “must also begin to plan for the necessary decommissioning of the pipeline and phasedown of the fossil fuel extraction the pipeline enables,” the petition said.
The first right-of-way granted to Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., the consortium that operates the pipeline and its marine terminal at Valdez, was issued in 1974 and had a 30-year duration — covering what was, at the time, the estimated lifespan of the system. That right-of-way was renewed for another 30 years in 2003.
While the current right-of-way does not expire for 12 years, the petitioners say the Department of the Interior should get to work right away.
“The longer we ignore and put off the inevitable, the harder it’s going to get and the more painful it will be,” said Cooper Freeman, Alaska director for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of six petitioning groups.
This time around, the petition says, the department should take a hard look at the way the pipeline system’s operations contribute to global climate change, as well as the way that climate change, through impacts like permafrost thaw, has destabilized and created possible new operational hazards for the line.
Climate change impacts were not much considered when the right-of-way was renewed the last time.
The 2002 environmental impact statement that led to the 2003 renewal mentioned climate change only a few times, and only in the context of its impact to the pipeline rather than the way the system’s operation affects the global climate.
In a passage about the geologic processes, the 2003 environmental report suggested that any effects of climate change on the system would be manageable. As for permafrost thaw, impacts to the pipeline’s vertical support members — the steel posts that hold the pipeline suspended above ground — were expected to vary, “ranging from insignificant to credible,” the document said.
The six environmental groups’ petition, aside from seeking a more complete review of climate change, asks for reviews of other impacts and operational issues.
One is the obligation of the oil companies to remove the pipeline and its associated infrastructure once they are no longer needed, an obligation called Dismantling, Removal and Restoration, or DR&R.
The petitioners want the next right-of-way to require an escrow account for DR&R obligations that go beyond existing promises that, they say, could be broken.
A common pattern and problem nationwide, Freeman said, is that these duties wind up falling on taxpayers when oil fields are abandoned, after big companies sell out to smaller companies with fewer resources.
The idea of planning for an end to North Slope oil production, however, runs counter to prevailing sentiment among Alaska’s oil industry and political leaders.
On social media, Gov. Mike Dunleavy blasted the petition.
“These groups are anarchists … and nuts. They are more interested in destroying Alaska and America than protecting the environment. Their only hope is that the judge is as crazy as they are. They want to tear down the trans-Alaska pipeline but are so disillusioned they can’t see the glaring logical fallacies in their own argument,” he said in a post June 12.
The Alaska Beacon is an independent, donor-funded news organization. Alaskabeacon.com.
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