This oil platform stopped pumping 30 years ago. Alaska still won’t make the

The Spurr oil platform stopped pumping crude from beneath the silty ocean water outside Anchorage in 1992. 

The platform, built in Cook Inlet during Alaska’s first oil boom in the 1960s, was losing money, officials from owner Marathon Oil wrote in a letter to the state. Oil production was expected to decline, and a review of seismic data showed that “no further economic development potential exists,” the letter said.

A top Alaska oil and gas official, Ken Boyd, agreed. He informed Marathon that in less than two years the company would need to start the process of demolishing and hauling away the hulking structure, as required under its lease with the state. 

When oil companies build offshore platforms and other infrastructure, they must also agree to restore the public property to the state’s satisfaction once they’ve finished extracting oil and gas.

But more than 30 years later, the platform is still there. It has not produced a drop of oil since George H.W. Bush was president. And it’s set to remain in the inlet for years more.

Boyd backed down, and since then, Cook Inlet oil and gas companies have been fending off state regulators’ repeated attempts to advance the costly process of dismantling their unused platforms — beating back those efforts and minimizing their obligations.

Today, the multi-level structure, complete with a helicopter landing pad and crane, sits unused, “rusting away,” as a state inspector wrote in a 2021 report. Signs warn of an asbestos hazard, and most rooms are in an “advanced state of disrepair,” with “paint peeling from the walls, standing water on the floor, and severely corroded piping and machinery,” other state inspectors wrote after a visit in October.

In a picturesque basin surrounded by glaciated volcanoes and teeming with salmon, Spurr has deteriorated into an eyesore. It now stands as a symbol of a pliant state policy that will be tested increasingly in the coming years, as more of Cook Inlet’s platforms deplete their petroleum deposits. 

Of the 17 platforms, 15 are now owned by Hilcorp, a company that specializes in managing “mature” oil fields. Six no longer produce oil and gas, and four have been offline for a decade or more. None have ever been removed.

Their continued presence in the inlet could foreshadow looming problems on Alaska’s North Slope. There, regulators will oversee a far more sprawling removal process when the massive Prudhoe Bay field and other developments eventually reach the ends of their useful lives.

State regulators are giving Hilcorp five more years to draft plans to repurpose some of its dormant infrastructure, such as for wind or other renewable power generation — options that federal regulators have dismissed as “not reasonably foreseeable” for oil platforms off the coast of California. At another defunct platform-like oil shipping terminal in Cook Inlet, Hilcorp is studying if it could simply allow underwater portions to erode away into the ocean — or even somehow accelerate that process “to force early structural failure.”

Richard Charter, a California-based ocean protection advocate, said it’s a playbook oil companies have used repeatedly — one he described as “delay, deny and diddle around.” 

“The hope is you’ll never have to do it,” said Charter, who’s lobbied for platform removal off California and in the Gulf of Mexico. “The reality is that if you can delay it, you’re making money somewhere else.”

Derek Nottingham, director of the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas, said he’s aware of the industry’s incentives.

“It’s financially a benefit, the longer they can defer it,” Nottingham said. “And we understand that’s going to be the company’s motivation.”

Removing all 17 platforms from the inlet, along with associated pipelines, could cost on the order of $1 billion, according to industry and watchdog groups’ estimates.

For two decades, Alaska oil companies have argued that the expensive process of removal should wait until many Cook Inlet platforms are ready for decommissioning all at once. That way, heavy-lift ships and other equipment from outside the state don’t have to be rented multiple times. It’s an argument that state officials agree has some merit.

Another reason state regulators have…