A milestone oil development project in Alaska's Arctic waters is having to extend its construction timeline to accommodate the warming climate. The recently approved Liberty Project — poised to become the first oil production facility in federal Arctic waters — has altered its plans due to the shrinking sea ice season.
The challenge comes as the Trump administration has reversed an Obama-era policy and
proposed re-opening the majority of Alaska's federal waters to drilling. It's pushing to hold a lease sale in the Beaufort Sea next year. The lease for the Liberty Project pre-dates the Obama-era ban on oil development in Arctic waters.
To get at the oil targeted by the Liberty Project, Texas-based oil company Hilcorp is planning to build a gravel island about five miles from shore, in the shallow waters of the Beaufort Sea, and drill from there. In order to build that island, Hilcorp needs to use what's called landfast sea ice, or ice that attaches to the coast each winter. Hilcorp would build an ice road on top of it, and transport the gravel in dump trucks.
"When it's in place and when it's stable, it makes, actually, a fairly convenient platform from which to operate," says Andy Mahoney, a sea ice researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He provides information to oil companies and federal regulators on ice thickness, extent, and seasonal duration. He says operating from sea ice can be easier than trying to work from a ship or barge.
But Mahoney says a primary concern he hears from oil companies these days is that the window they have to work on sea ice is shrinking as the
Arctic warms. Rising temperatures, of course, are driven by the burning of fossil fuels, and the Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the world.
Mahoney's
research shows that the landfast ice on the Beaufort Sea is forming later, and breaking up sooner than it used to. Between 1973 and 2008, satellite data showed the seasonal duration of the ice shrank by around 7 weeks. Mahoney says it's likely declined even more since then.