EFL: WASHINGTON--Federal officials want to offer oil leases in about 400,000 acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska that that were put off-limits six years ago to protect wildlife. The Alaska head of an environmental group said the change would threaten caribou, but the federal Bureau of Land Management's state director said the proposed plan in many ways offers more protections to wildlife. The expanded leasing in the NPR-A's northeast corner is part of the "preferred alternative" outlined by the BLM in a draft environmental impact statement released Wednesday. Comments on the draft will be taken through Aug. 2. "We believe very strongly that we can appropriately explore and develop the area and protect the resource values in the new area that would be made available," said Henri Bisson, the Bureau of Land Management's state director in Anchorage.
In 1998, the Clinton administration completed a plan for the NPR-A's northeast area that blocked oil leasing from Teshekpuk Lake north to the Beaufort Sea coastline--about 600,000 acres. The plan also blocked surface activity on another 240,000 acres along the southern edge of that acreage. That essentially reconfirmed an off-limits policy around Teshekpuk Lake that dated back to 1983, Bisson said. The BLM proposed Wednesday to cut the area off-limits area down to a core 213,000 acres northeast of Teshekpuk Lake. The lake itself would be available for leasing, as would all the area just to the south where surface activity is blocked. Bisson said BLM proposed revising the 1998 plan because new information indicated important oil resources in the area, he said. The current plan shuts off leasing on NPR-A's highest-potential area, he said. The expanded leasing could boost potential future oil production to 2.1 billion barrels from the current 600 million barrels, at a price of $30 per barrel. | That's a hell of a lot of American oil. |
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