(AK) Judge has issues with Army Corps plan to allow road, bridge to NPR-A

[unhappycamper]

http://www.adn.com/2014/05/28/3491021/judge-has-issues-with-army-corps.html?sp=/99/171/

Judge has issues with Army Corps plan to allow road, bridge to NPR-A
By YERETH ROSEN
May 28, 2014

A hotly contested permit allowing ConocoPhillips to build a road and bridge to a new oil field is now in doubt after a federal judge ruled that regulators approved it without fully considering environmental impacts.

U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason, in a ruling issued Tuesday, said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erred in the way it issued a wetlands-fill permit that ConocoPhillips needed to build a gravel road and a road-and-bridge link for its CD-5 oil field on the western North Slope.

Construction is already partly done, with the 6-mile access road and pad installed and some bridge work finished over the winter, ConocoPhillips spokeswoman Natalie Lowman said.

However, the permit allowing that work is flawed, Gleason found, because the Corps -- which approved the permit in 2011 after previously rejecting ConocoPhillips' permit application -- failed to justify its decision to skip a supplemental environmental impact statement. The Corps should have considered further study to weigh modifications to ConocoPhillips' plan and potential impacts to a North Slope environment already being altered by climate change, Gleason said in her ruling.