04-10-04

Federal officials say the marshy tundra around a giant lake on Alaska's North Slope could hold hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil, enough to significantly boost domestic oil production for a nation heavily dependent on foreign imports.

To get at the oil, the Bureau of Land Management recently proposed rolling back restrictions imposed in 1998 during the Clinton administration that keep oil explorers out of areas important for migratory geese and other wildlife.

Now the BLM is under siege from environmental groups, other federal agencies and Eskimos, all of whom say leasing the protected waters of Teshekpuk Lake and the surrounding tundra is a horrible idea. They say oil exploration could stress easily spooked flocks of moulting geese that summer in the northeast corner of an Indiana-size federal tract called the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

The BLM's preliminary plan is "likely to cause significant adverse impacts" to wildlife and habitat, according to officials with the US Environmental Protection Agency, who urged the BLM to ditch the plan.

US Fish and Wildlife Service officials said oil activity risks "irreversible" population drops for geese, which rely on Teshekpuk and nearby lakes as "the most important known goose moulting area on the Arctic coast of North America and Siberia." Tens of thousands of black brant, white-fronted geese, tundra swans and other birds fly great distances to Teshekpuk, and the protected area should be made permanent instead of pared down as the BLM proposes, said Stan Senner, Alaska director for the National Audubon Society, a bird conservation group.

"Everyone, whether they are subsistence hunters on the North Slope, whether they are goose hunters on the Texas coast or bird watchers on Chesapeake Bay -- all of them have a stake in what happens around Teshekpuk Lake," he said.

Mounting interest in the BLM proposal reflects the petroleum reserve's emerging profile as a national environmental battleground. It's a junior version of the long fight over another piece of public land to the east, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where Congress has not yet allowed drilling.

The rising flap over the petroleum reserve vexes Gov. Frank Murkowski, who fought unsuccessfully during his more than 20 years in the US Senate to persuade his colleagues to open ANWR to drillers. With ANWR locked away, he said, people he terms "extreme environmentalists" are now targeting the petroleum reserve, which President Warren Harding set aside for its oil potential in 1923 and which Congress cleared for drilling long ago.

"This was predictable," Murkowski said. "We knew they'd move right over to NPR-A."

Murkowski said oil companies already have proven elsewhere on the North Slope that they can coexist with birds, caribou and other wildlife. The state stands to rake in royalties and other revenue if significant oil is found in the petroleum reserve. It recommended to the BLM that the entire 4.6 mm acres of the northeast reserve be made available for oilleasing.

But state biologists stressed that great care should be taken with Teshekpuk. They asked the BLM to defer leasing in and around Teshekpuk Lake or at least forbid permanent oil and gas processing plants or pipelines pending further study.

Source: Anchorage Daily News