OPINION: Alaska’s watchdog is fast asleep

The oil industry still dominates the Alaska economy. Even as the Permanent Fund grows larger and larger, and its earnings eclipse the income the state gets from petroleum, the oil industry, from Cook Inlet to the North Slope, is the biggest and strongest economic player. The state and the people who live here have benefited from the industry. I started my Alaska career with 12 years of blue-collar work in our oil fields and those earnings propelled me through law school. There are thousands of Alaskans who have stories like mine.

For all the good that oil development has done for our state, many of us still remember the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 and the Veco bribery scandal in 2006. The American system of checks and balances means that the industry has to be regulated to protect the things we love about our home like clean air and clean water. In Alaska, there is no regulator given more authority over the oil industry than the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

The commission traces its history to pre-statehood. The Territorial Legislature, seeing the promise of coming oil development on the Kenai Peninsula, acted in 1955 to create the commission before a single well was drilled. The commission has a broad mandate and broad powers to enforce the law. The commission can issue subpoenas to force the production of documents or the attendance of witnesses at a hearing. A drill bit hunting for oil does not enter the ground in Alaska without permission from the AOGCC. In short, the commission was designed to be a vigorous industry watchdog.

Unfortunately for Alaska, the AOGCC watchdog has fallen fast asleep. The latest gas leak on the North Slope, at Conoco-Phillips’ Alpine field, provides the most recent evidence. The leak was first detected at 3:45 am on Friday, March 4. On Tuesday, March 8, this newspaper reported that non-essential employees were being evacuated from Alpine, and quoted an AOGCC employee who said, “Based on its investigation to date, AOGCC is unaware of any threats to public safety.”

That sounds pretty good until you match that statement up against a rather astounding fact uncovered by Adam Federman, a reporter with Type Investigations. Through a simple public records request, he discovered that there was no email traffic whatsoever between AOGCC and ConocoPhillips about this incident until late in the afternoon of Wednesday, March 9, five days after the leak was discovered.

It’s hard to imagine a more passive response. What “investigation” was AOGCC referring to on March 8? What actual steps had the agency taken at that point to get a handle on a large and baffling gas leak?

Perhaps in the future, we will discover that AOGCC was actually communicating with ConocoPhillips about this leak some other way. Maybe there were conference calls, meetings or official letters sent back and forth. But the appearance is that the watchdog was in its kennel, doing nothing.

This incident fits with a pattern of indifference to methane leaks for the AOGCC. When a gas pipeline burst in Cook Inlet a few years ago and spewed gas to the atmosphere for months, and caused the loss of tens of thousands of barrels of oil production, the agency took the bizarre, head-in-the-sand position that the leak was none of its concern. This powerful regulator pleaded that it was powerless to act. It took the Alaska Supreme Court to correct the agency. “The Commission,” wrote the Court, “had jurisdiction over the leak at issue.”

A rational agency would be embarrassed by that ruling. Instead, AOGCC continued to defy logic and reason and refused to take any action in that case.

Gas leaks are bad for everyone. They are inherently dangerous and wasteful. The lost gas could have heated your home. The methane in natural gas is a climate change accelerator. Our state’s oil and gas watchdog should wake up from its sleep and start doing its job.

Hollis French is a lawyer and former Alaska state senator from Anchorage. He served on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission from 2016 to 2019.

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