A little-known federal agency called Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has a big role in regulating nearly 7,000 miles of coastline in Alaska.
Last week, the bureau’s Regional Director Givey Kochanowski and Public Affairs Officer John Callahan met with dozens of lawmakers in Juneau. They also met with KTOO reporter Anna Canny, who asked them about the emergence of new technologies like offshore renewable energy and carbon storage projects in the state.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Givey Kochanowski: Good morning. I’m Givey Kochanowski. I’m the Regional Director for the Alaska region of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
John Callahan: Yeah, John Callahan, and I’m the Public Affairs Officer for the Alaska Region.
Anna Canny: Thanks for joining me this morning. So I want to start off just for some of our listeners who haven’t heard of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Could you give us a little rundown of some of the work your agency does?
Givey Kochanowski: We were created by Congress, originally to economically and environmentally friendly developed the Outer Continental Shelf, and those means the federal waters of the United States. And here in Alaska and elsewhere, that begins three miles offshore. So we’re not a funding or development agency. We’re a regulatory and permitting agency. So we work with other federal and state agencies to accomplish our mission in partnership.
John Callahan: Um, if you wanted to explore for oil and gas, or minerals, or develop any energy sources in that zone — more than three miles offshore — we’re the bureau that you would come to.
Anna Canny: Sounds like that would apply to a wide variety of resource development projects. And I know in the past, the agency has focused on oil and gas projects, but I’m wondering if you could speak a little bit to the agency’s recent shift towards renewable energy projects?
Givey Kochanowski: It’s kind of a shift, but it’s kind of not a shift at the same time. We have never stopped doing our legacy mission of conventional energy, we have active leases and Cook Inlet and on the North Slope for conventional energy. We have petroleum engineers on staff that helped maintain our work and the conventional side. But in addition to that, we’re expanding into some exciting new areas, which include renewable power, critical minerals and marine minerals, and also carbon storage. But on a renewable front, what’s really exciting right now is a study that just came out from the National Renewable Energy Lab that we funded, looking at the renewable energy potential for Cook Inlet. And that has grid-wide impacts for Alaska where the majority of our population lives.
John Callahan: Tidal energy is promising, wind energy is probably more promising in terms of a development prospect in the near-term. There’s an area off Southern Cook Inlet, north of the Barren Islands, that has literally literally some of the best winds in the world — it blows hard, it goes constantly — and those are the sort of resources that we’re looking to bring to bear.
Anna Canny: Okay, so developing renewables, that’s huge for cutting the amount of carbon emissions we’re putting into the atmosphere. On the flip side of that, I noticed you mentioned carbon storage or carbon sequestration — basically taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it, in this case, underground. And I thought that was really interesting. That’s been a hot topic here in Alaska, since Governor Dunleavy introduced his carbon management bill last session. So what will BOEM’s role be in, in safely rolling out those types of projects in the state?
Givey Kochanowski: If you look at a map of the state, many of the areas in coastal Alaska that fall in the federal jurisdiction, are very well suited for carbon storage — so the Cook Inlet and Northwestern Alaska — I think this is an exciting time to be in this space to be in the ground level of it. And that it’s also wonderful to come down here and learn that the state government is working in parallel to a lot of what we’re trying to accomplish, that there could be a lot of synergies there and collaboration.
John Callahan: Yeah, and, and very relevant to that, so carbon sequestration, as you know, is a very promising technology, right? But it’s in its relative infancy. Our bureau, we again, are the ones who are going to be tasked with regulating that, in the offshore space. And in fact, we have been developing draft regulations in concert with other cooperating agencies, and expect to have draft regulations out to that effect later this year.
Anna Canny: And finally, you’re in town this week talking with legislators about some of these things — the carbon sequestration, the new renewable energy projects – how are those conversations going? And could you give us an idea of, of what that might mean for the agency’s future work in the region?
John Callahan: All the legislators down here, both left and right, are very focused on energy issues — well-informed, we’ve gotten good questions. And we really appreciate the opportunity to educate them on how BOEM is part of that energy mix, especially as we get this renewable energy initiative kicked off.
Givey Kochanowski: Yeah, and you know, as Alaskans, many of us have concerns about the overreach of the federal government pushing stuff onto the state without state coordination or collaboration, and there’s no better way to get collaboration than working with the state, coming down here talking to legislators working with state agencies, like the Alaska Energy Authority, and the Department of Natural Resources, Department of Revenue. And we have several state agencies as part of our Cook Inlet workgroup, looking at ways to harmonize the development pathway for industry, so that you don’t get nine or ten different answers from nine agencies, that you get a solid approach to what will it take to actually make a project happen in Alaska.