REMEDIATION: Plugging just one carries price tag in the millions of dollars.
Wesley Loy of the Petroleum News reported that officials with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management say the agency is monitoring environmental risk from old wells on federal land on Alaska's North Slope, as well as updating plans for remediating the sites.
The comments come in response to an Alaska state legislator's charge that the BLM has neglected the dozens of so-called legacy wells.
Rep. Charisse Millett, R-Anchorage, is sponsoring House Joint Resolution 29, which urges the BLM "to plug legacy wells properly and to reclaim the legacy well sites as soon as possible." Artealia Gilliard, spokeswoman for BLM Alaska, said the agency's priority is monitoring the wells posing the most risk.
Extreme coastal erosion has threatened a few legacy well sites, and the BLM has spent large sums to deal with those.
BLM manages the Indiana-sized National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, located to the west of Alpine, Kuparuk, Prudhoe Bay and other central North Slope oil fields.
Between 1943 and 1982, the Navy and the U.S. Geological Survey drilled 136 wells and "test holes."
"It would be great if we could go out and remediate them all at once, but it's just not realistic," Gilliard said.
Go here for the full story on the Anchorage Daily News website --->>>
