ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Two months after a judge found flaws in the government’s environmental assessment of petroleum drilling in the Chukchi Sea, federal offshore regulators released a revised analysis that was immediately denounced by environmental and Alaska Native groups.
The report analyzed the most viable natural-gas development and production scenario for Chukchi leases rather than a minimum scenario. It concluded that certain missing environmental information was not essential for going ahead with the lease sale, such as how a spill might affect a specific species.
A previous analysis looked only at the development of the first field of 1 billion barrels of oil, which is considered the minimum level of potential development in an area in which there also is high interest in natural-gas development, according to a judge’s ruling in July.
Earthjustice and groups that sued to halt drilling called the revised assessment hasty and incomplete for failing to fill the government’s acknowledged data gaps about basic biology and habitat use of numerous species. Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, acknowledged that Alaska’s frontier areas need additional risk analysis before any determinations are made as to future leasing and permitting. The Associated Press
