AOGA: fostering long-term viability of the oil and gas industry: agency a major player in resource decisions.

• Author: Campbell, Blythe
• Position: Alaska Oil and Gas Association

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Alaska Oil and Gas Association (AOGA), an oil industry trade association, celebrated its 40th anniversary last year. The original office opened in 1966 as the Alaska Division of the Western Oil and Gas Association (WOGA), headed by Bill Bishop, the Richfield oil geologist who is often credited with the 1957 Swanson River discovery. Bill Hopkins started working for Bishop in 1968 as the organization's information officer, right at the time of the $1 billion lease sale at Prudhoe Bay.

"Environmental issues were starting to become very important--and that's when the professional environmental groups began to get some muscle and target Alaska," said Hopkins, who served as AOGA's executive director from 1972 through 1993.

The lion's share of WOGA's work, however, was focused on regulatory issues. The oil industry was a new industry in a new state, and regulation in Alaska was a blank slate. WOGA and the industry worked with the state, and Alaska borrowed regulations from other western states, particularly for land laws.

"In Texas, you had close alliances with the people who owned the land--ranchers and farmers," said Hopkins. Not so with the oil industry in Alaska. The federal government and the state owned most of the land, and there were no established relationships. WOGA committees worked day after day to review and comment on the proposed regulations, so agencies could understand the industry's concerns.

BIG CHANGES

In 1989, AOGA totally separated from WOGA, and became a standalone nonprofit oil and gas trade association. That was also the year that the State changed the Economic Limit Factor, or ELF, which resulted in substantially increased taxes on Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk while limiting or eliminating taxes on other fields.

Hopkins retired in 1993 and Judy Brady became AOGA's executive director after a career in business and a stint as commissioner of Alaska's Department of Natural Resources.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

At that time, oil was $18 a barrel and Prudhoe Bay had already started to decline. Leasing, in particular, was a critical issue for AOGA and its members. There were court cases on every sale, disputing the process or the documentation. Whole tracts were eliminated. Professional environmental groups were focused on every lease sale. "On State lands, we'd been leasing for 30 years, but each lease was treated like it was new," said Brady.

AOGA's staff and committees spent thousands of hours studying the...