ANCHORAGE, Alaska, July 18 (Reuters) – A breached pipeline at one of BP’s Alaska oilfields spilled a mixture of methanol and oily produced water, Alaska environmental officials said Sunday.     The affected pipeline, which runs underground, failed during a pressure test that was conducted while the BP-operated Lisburne field was shut in for summer maintenance, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation said.

Lisburne, managed as part of the Greater Prudhoe Bay Unit, has daily production that usually averages about 30,000 to 32,000 barrels, according to Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission records. But the field has produced no oil since June 18, according to AOGCC records, suggesting maintenance work requiring a prolonged shutdown.

The spill occurred on Saturday, the department said. It was estimated at 2,100 to 4,200 gallons, the department said.    BP officials were not immediately available Sunday night to comment.

A rig explosion unleashed millions of barrels of oil from BP’s Macondo well into the Gulf of Mexico last year.

   The breached pipeline in Alaska serves one of Lisburne’s eight drill pads, department officials said. Production from the entire Lisburne field remains shut off while the spill is addressed, officials said.    Immediate efforts are focused on containment and cleanup, said Tom DeRuyter, state on-scene coordinator for the Department of Environmental Conservation.

The methanol-produced water mix has spread into wet tundra as well as onto a gravel pad, bringing risks to slow-growing vegetation, DeRuyter said. “You have actively growing plants and they’re very susceptible to the contaminants,” he said.     The pipeline will also have to be dug up to allow for an investigation into why it failed, he said.     Resumption of normal operations at that part of the field may require a relatively long wait, DeRuyter said.     “I think they’re looking at trying to get that pad back up before freeze-up,” he said.

(Editing by James Jukwey)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Two Alaskans pleaded guilty on Friday to illegally buying and selling hundreds of pounds of walrus tusks in what prosecutors described as Alaska’s biggest wildlife-trafficking case in nearly 20 years.

The pair, along with a third defendant scheduled to plead guilty next week, were arrested in April on charges of trading cash, guns, cigarettes and at least one snowmobile for around 1,000 pounds of raw walrus ivory and other animal parts.

They obtained the materials by trading with Yup’ik Eskimo hunters from the impoverished village of Savoonga, located on an island in the Bering Strait, according to court documents.

Under federal law, only Alaska Natives may harvest walruses, whales, polar bears and other marine mammals, and only for traditional subsistence purposes.

Federal law forbids any sale of raw animal parts from marine mammals, though Alaska Natives are permitted to sell finished works of art crafted from animal parts.

A trial for all three defendants had been slated to start this week over a trafficking conspiracy that involved tusks from an estimated 100 walruses, along with skulls, bones and hides of polar bears and whales, court documents said.

Jesse Leboeuf, of Glennallen, Alaska, pleaded guilty to five of the 15 counts against him, including weapons charges as well as wildlife-trafficking offenses.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, July 13 (Reuters) – The Trans Alaska Pipeline System will shut down at the weekend for scheduled maintenance, the operator said Wednesday.

Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., the consortium that operates the 800-mile oil line, said several major work projects are scheduled to be completed during the shutdown.

They include replacement of valves at one pump station to enable launching and retrieval of inline cleaning devices known as “pigs,” replacement of piping at another pump station and other major maintenance projects and inspections, Alyeska said.

The shutdown will start Saturday morning and is expected to last through Sunday evening, Alyeska said.

This will be the only scheduled maintenance shutdown this summer, said Alyeska spokeswoman Michelle Egan.

The company usually conducts one or two such shutdowns each summer, allowing for coordination of maintenance projects that must be done at times when oil is not flowing through the line.

Generally, North Slope oil producers also conduct major maintenance projects during the scheduled shutdowns, Alyeska said.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – An unfinished Indian canoe, apparently abandoned five centuries ago, has been discovered in a remote section of a southeast Alaska rain forest, officials said on Wednesday.

The canoe, carved from cedar, was discovered under a thick layer of moss and is surrounded by trees that are several hundred years old, Sealaska Corp., the Alaska Native corporation that owns the land, said in a statement.

The artifact was first spotted last winter by a surveyor checking potential timber-harvest sites, but the discovery was kept confidential until now, the company said.

Its exact site – near the Haida and Tlingit village of Kasaan on Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island – was also being kept confidential, Sealaska said.

Preliminary examination shows that ancient hand tools, not modern saws introduced by Europeans, were used to cut the wood and hollow out the 33-foot-by-11-inch canoe, Sealaska officials said.

Based on that, and on the age of the cedar trees that have grown up around the site, experts believe the canoe is roughly 500 years old.

Rosita Worl, an anthropologist and president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute, said she knows of only one other canoe found in the rain forest of southeast Alaska. This is a special find, she said on Wednesday.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin said in a newly disclosed email she sent just days after taking office in 2006 that she felt her circle of trusted advisors was “shrinking daily.”

The message was released late on Wednesday as part of 54 pages of additional email correspondence from Palin’s early days as governor that state officials said were inadvertently omitted from a load of over 24,000 pages furnished last month to news organizations.

Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, prematurely resigned as governor two years ago and has said she is thinking about running for president in 2012.

The latest release of documents contained only half a dozen emails from Palin, with the rest of the collection consisting of notes sent by her aides. The most frequent topics discussed in the messages were appointments to Palin’s then new administration.

One message in particular illustrated Palin’s apparent sense she only had a few aides she felt she could trust.

In the email sent to an official with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, Palin complained about her legislative director, John Bitney, whom she eventually fired.

“I am finding my circle of confidants to be shrinking daily,” Palin said in the message dated December 12, 2006, eight days after she was inaugurated as governor.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – An Austrian climber missing for days on Mount McKinley has been found dead, apparently killed in a 4,000-foot fall, the National Park Service said on Friday.

Juergen Kanzian’s body was found on Thursday night at the 15,300-foot elevation, at the base of a steep snow and rock gully known as the “Orient Express,” the Park Service said.

His backpack and skis were left at a rock outcropping at the 19,000-foot level of the mountain, the Park Service said.

Searchers on a helicopter spotted the body and the climber’s gear, the Park Service said.

They were unable to land, but confirmed that Kanzian was dead, said Maureen McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for Denali National Park.

A team was planning to ascend Friday to the site and bring the body to a camp at 14,200-foot level so that it can be flown off the mountain, McLaughlin said.

Kanzian, a 41-year-old mountaineering guide in the Alps, had last been seen on Monday night, ascending at the 18,000-foot level.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, June 30 (Reuters) – Alaska’s governor and natural resource commissioner on Thursday promoted upcoming state oil and gas lease sales as part of a strategy to reverse the decline in production from aging North Slope fields and to boost domestic energy production.

Governor Sean Parnell, a Republican, and Natural Resources Commissioner Dan Sullivan, made their pitch in speeches to the United States Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C.

They said they have high hopes for upcoming and long-scheduled October lease sales that will offer exploration rights in arctic regions sprawling over 14.7 million acres of state territory in the central North Slope, the Beaufort Sea and the Brooks Range foothills.

The exact amount of acreage available for leasing has yet to be determined.

“For America’s sake, we are setting an example for what other resource states can do,” Parnell said in a speech to the group.

Recordings of the speeches were made available to reporters.

Sullivan said he expects companies to bid for rights to explore the many small but untouched deposits of oil believed to still exist in the central North Slope, as well as shale oil in the foothills and oil in state territory bordering the “highly prospective” federally owned Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Denali National Park rangers and volunteers were searching on Thursday for a missing Austrian climber last seen heading for the summit of Mount McKinley in Alaska.

Juergen Kanzian, 41, was attempting a solo climb of North America’s tallest peak and was last spotted on Monday ascending Denali Pass, a notch at about the 18,000-foot level of the 20,320-foot peak, officials said.

Other climbers notified park rangers when he had not returned to his camp at the 17,200-foot level by Tuesday night.

Kanzian, a mountaineering guide in the Alps, had told other climbers he intended to ski down after he reached the summit, park officials said.

Denali Pass is a sometimes-treacherous spot in the route up McKinley, the site of many fatal falls. This summer, three people have died in the area, including a guide leading a roped party.

Climbers still on the mountain were keeping their eyes peeled for signs of the missing Austrian, said Maureen McLaughlin, a Denali spokeswoman.

Rangers have found no sign of him despite a search on the mountain by aircraft in which they took hundreds of high-resolution photographs, officials said.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, June 29 (Reuters) – The Trans Alaska Pipeline System, Alaska’s main economic artery, may only have 10 years of service left if oil flows continue to dwindle at current rates, according to a report issued on Wednesday by the system’s operator.

The pipeline can operate reliably with oil flows as low as 350,000 barrels per day, but throughput below that threatens its viability, said the report by Alyeska Pipeline Service Co, which manages the pipeline for owners BP, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and other oil companies.

That threshold — expected to be reached in about a decade if oil production continues to decline at current rates — is the first ever identified as a specific minimum throughput for reliable operations.

The 800-mile pipeline shipped an average of about 605,000 barrels per day in May, less than a third of the 2 million barrel peak achieved in 1988. The pipeline system carries all of the crude oil produced on Alaska’s North Slope, at Prudhoe Bay and other fields, to the shipping port at Valdez. Flow has declined as production from maturing fields dwindles.

Alyeska, the consortium that operates the pipeline and its Valdez marine terminal, issued the report at the conclusion of a $10 million, two-year research project.

Operating safely at 350,000 barrels per day would require a series of improvements, the report said. They include enhanced insulation or introduction of heat sources to keep oil warm, better storage and shipping management to prevent interruptions, better use of corrosion inhibitor and an overhaul of the cold-restart procedures to help prevent freezing problems.

Without those improvements, the threshold for reliable operations is 550,000 barrels per day, the report said.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Alaska’s Cook Inlet basin still has potential for abundant natural gas and oil discoveries even after five decades of production, according to a federal report issued on Tuesday, signaling potential revenue for the state and more interest from developers.

In the first resource assessment issued since 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey said the inlet area likely holds 19 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas — nearly nine times the last estimate — and 600 million barrels of recoverable crude oil.

The new report is much more optimistic about remaining natural gas in the inlet than the assessment issued 16 years ago, a difference the USGS attributed to improved data, new geologic information and better technology for recovering the oil and gas.

In 1995, the USGS estimated that Cook Inlet likely had 2.14 trillion cubic feet of gas remaining to be discovered.

The new report includes the first-ever estimates for unconventional natural gas in Cook Inlet, most of which is coal gas and which accounts for a quarter of total estimated undiscovered natural gas resources. That was not included in the 1995 report as it was not then considered recoverable.

The Cook Inlet basin, in production since the 1950s, is older than the more prolific North Slope. Since 1958 the Cook Inlet basin has produced 1.3 billion barrels of oil and 7.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to the USGS. Oil has been mostly refined for regional markets, while natural gas has fueled regional utilities and been liquefied for export to Japan and other countries.

The new USGS report comes a week after a state-sponsored oil and gas lease sale for Cook Inlet drew brisk bidding, including $9 million from Apache Corp. The total $11.1 million in high bids made it the fourth most lucrative Cook Inlet lease sale in state history.