DC Court Ruling Puts Alaska Jobs & Industry at Risk
Sean Parnell, Lieutenant Governor of Alaska, submitted the following Op-Ed to The Anchorage Daily News on June 15, 2009. View by clicking here.
Recently, a DC federal appeals court air-dropped a ruling on Alaska that effectively swept away our nation’s current five-year offshore energy program, a full two years into its implementation. The court’s decision threw into question at least 487 leases in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea and 1,854 leases already issued in the Gulf of Mexico. This ruling jeopardizes thousands of Alaska jobs and billions in potential state and federal revenue.
Before a drop of oil or vapor of natural gas can ever be produced offshore, the area in which new domestic energy exploration may someday take place must be included in the Interior Department’s five-year energy plan. For an area to be included in that five-year plan, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) requires an exhaustive multi-year process of research, study, public comment, and more study. The five-year offshore program helps meet the nation’s energy needs while considering environmental sensitivities. Alaska’s Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, along with other basins, were included in that last federal five-year plan.
Now, the court decision has left the U.S. Department of Interior scratching its head, wondering what procedures it should follow; whether future lease sales must be stopped; and whether it has to develop an all new five-year program-something that would add years of delay and lost production and jobs.
Earlier this spring, the Secretary of Interior, Ken Salazar, visited Anchorage and heard firsthand what everyday Alaskans thought of the potential for a new, expanded five-year energy plan. Most Alaskans strongly support responsible off-shore development. Multiple layers of environmental protections safeguard the environment. Additionally, companies go above and beyond by negotiating more stringent measures in conflict avoidance agreements with our citizens so as not to disrupt subsistence activities or harm food supplies for our people.
The Secretary’s task at hand now is to get Interior to make the changes needed to keep the current five-year plan afloat, and quickly. Putting the brakes on domestic energy production does not prevent global warming or threats to species. It actually increases the problem by shifting resource extraction to less environmentally preferred fuels and locations.
What can Secretary Salazar do? He can get the current five-year energy program working for Alaska and all of America again. To comply with the court’s ruling, no new field work need be completed nor any new data obtained. Instead, Interior can take a fresh look at “relative environmental sensitivity” through the lens of earlier, field-tested five-year plans.
In the five-year offshore leasing program the court vacated, Interior ranked the environmental sensitivity of various program areas in terms of only one factor: the “physical characteristics” of the shoreline of those areas. Earlier five-year offshore leasing plans focused on whole planning areas, and grouped relative sensitivity into both marine and coastal habitat components. The Secretary could do the same once again with existing information.
What exactly is at stake? The health of our economy, and tens of thousands of Alaska jobs. We depend in great part on our ability to produce and sell energy; our ability to sell energy depends on the well-being of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS); the well-being of TAPS depends on our ability to feed it new volumes of oil; our ability to secure new volumes depends on whether we can produce in the Chukchi and Beaufort. Producing in those seas will be impossible without a workable five-year plan. And, the recent DC appellate panel ruling may force the Department of Interior to return more than $10 billion in money derived from old lease sales.
Over the long-term, we risk far worse. Alaska could lose thousands of jobs; we risk the decline and degradation of the pipeline and Permanent Fund losses; and, our economy will grow ever more dependent on a federal government that doesn’t look out for us nor spend our tax dollars wisely. America risks higher cost energy, higher taxes, and greater dependence on foreign oil. The Secretary has the tools in hand to meet the court’s concerns. I’m asking him to use them without delay.
