The overseers: joint pipeline office a melting pot of 12 other state and federal agencies.

• Author: Liles, Patricia

As all natural resource extraction businesses know, development of Alaska's assets requires working with a myriad of overseeing government agencies, obtaining numerous permits and complying with vast volumes of regulatory rules.

For Alaska's largest single resource development project, construction and operation of the 800-mile trans-Alaska oil pipeline and its related infrastructure, government agencies that provide the required oversight responsibility have formed a separate, stand-alone organization-the Joint Pipeline Office.

"Prior to TAPS construction, everyone recognized that there would be thousands of permits needed and dozens of state and federal agencies involved," said Rhea DoBosh, communications director at the Joint Pipeline Office. "It benefits the agencies and industry to have a one-stop shop, to ease the difficulty in working the way through the process."

Six state and six federal agencies that share similar regulatory or management responsibilities related to oil and gas pipelines in Alaska make up Alaska's Joint Pipeline Office, headquartered in Anchorage with field offices in Fairbanks and Valdez. Core agencies with management responsibility are the Alaska Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, as the land managers.

Representatives from six of the 12 agencies are co-located in the main office, working to coordinate oversight of pipelines, and issue right-of-way leases and other permits needed for oil and gas projects. "Some agencies do not need daily contact, so they don't have liaisons, because they don't work with these projects on an everyday basis," DoBosh said. "We have 'as needed' involvement from some agencies."

Heading up the Joint Pipeline Office is the state pipeline coordinator, on the state side; and the Authorized Officer on the federal side. Currently, those positions are held by Mike Thompson and Jerry Brossia, respectively.

Currently, about 65 employees are now working in the Joint Pipeline Office structure. Budgets for the office include BLM's spending, which had a $4.3 million budget for the fiscal year 2005, and $3.1 million for the State Pipeline Coordinator's Office for the fiscal year 2005, according to the 2004-2005 JPO annual report.

Funding for the budgets comes from industry, through a number of memorandum of agreements signed between agencies and developers that define what regulatory work must be completed for each project and what the anticipated cost will be...