BLM Completes Cleanup of East Teshekpuk Well in NPR-A

	An excavator removes metal debris from the East Teshekpuk reserve pit so that the pit's contents can be removed.

In April the Bureau of Land Management completed cleanup of the East Teshekpuk Lake well site in the National Petroleum Reserve - Alaska. 

The government “legacy” well, one of 136 such wells managed by the BLM, is located on a peninsula on the lake’s eastern shore, approximately 100 miles southeast of Barrow. Wind-driven erosion had gradually exposed buried solid waste and breached the back-filled reserve pit at the site, posing a potential threat to Teshekpuk Lake, the North Slope’s largest freshwater lake.

Despite delays caused by difficult arctic conditions, the contractor, Alaska Native-owned Marsh Creek, LLC, successfully plugged and abandoned the well ahead of schedule. The company excavated 1,500 cubic yards of petroleum-contaminated drilling muds from the well’s reserve pit and trucked this material 17 miles via a temporary ice road to an inactive drill pad not threatened by erosion. There the material will be stored in accordance with State of Alaska requirements. In addition, Marsh Creek removed 50 cubic yards of metal debris that had started to erode into the lake from the flare pit and other buried areas of the pad. The metal debris was transported to the Deadhorse landfill.

	Equipment prepares the North Kalikpik well pad to serve as a storage site for material excavated from the East Teshekpuk site.

Legacy wells are exploratory wells drilled under the direction of the U.S. government within the petroleum reserve before the BLM’s NPR-A oil and gas lease sale in 1982. 

The Department of the Interior and the BLM are now addressing remediation of legacy well sites that pose a potential environmental risk. The Atigaru and Drew Point sites are next in priority for action because of accelerated coastal erosion on the shore of the Beaufort Sea. 

During the winter of 2005, the BLM cleaned up the J.W. Dalton legacy well site when the Beaufort Sea threatened to erode the well’s casing and a breached reserve pit. Within six months of the cleanup, summer storms had washed the project site into the sea. 

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