Deal to Open Alaska Oil Field Criticized : Environment: Groups are concerned that an agreement by Arco and its partners isn’t sufficient to protect some unusual coastal fish.

Environmental groups plan to deliver a letter of protest today to the Army Corps of Engineers’ Anchorage office, asking the district engineer to reconsider an agreement reached last week to open up an Alaskan oil field that is expected to produce up to 100,000 barrels a day.

The corps, which earlier had opposed the project, agreed to plans to develop the Point McIntyre field, discovered two years ago near Prudhoe Bay.

Atlantic Richfield Co., Exxon Corp. and BP Exploration, a unit of British Petroleum Co., pledged to spend $50 million to satisfy the corps’ concerns that development would injure several species of unusual coastal fish. The money will be used to open large holes in two causeways to allow fish to migrate through them.

But environmentalists believe that the breaches are not big enough, and that the corps has given in to pressure to increase domestic oil production during the Mideast crisis.

“The local corps office has tried to do its job, but it’s been outmuscled and outgunned by both the oil companies and higher authorities in the corps,” said Debra L. Donahue, staff attorney in the Anchorage field office of the National Wildlife Federation.

The Bush Administration has been anxious to increase domestic oil production since the loss of 200,000 barrels a day of Kuwaiti oil. Under the agreement, mediated by the Energy Department, production could begin within two years.

The federation and Trustees for Alaska, an environmental legal firm, expect to gather signatures for the letter from a half-dozen other environmental groups based in Anchorage.

Ronald W. Chappell, a spokesman in Arco’s Anchorage office, said $20 million worth of studies have shown “no impact on the fish populations, no impact of any kind. The studies have shown that there have been changes in water temperature and salinity, in near-shore areas, but those changes are within the natural variations that occur in the Beaufort Sea.”

Two main causeways--the West Dock and Endicott--connect drilling operations around Prudhoe Bay. Some of the new drilling rigs would also be set up on these gravel roadways.

Several varieties of fish--including the broad whitefish, arctic char, least cisco and arctic cisco--migrate through these waters. Environmentalists say the causeways are destroying their feeding habitat and changing their patterns of movement in ways that could reduce fish populations.

The corps and the oil companies have agreed to add a total of 650 feet of breaches to the two causeways. The West Dock causeway currently has 52 feet of breaches, and the Endicott causeway, 700 feet.

But Donahue and other environmental groups, including the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, in Fairbanks, say much bigger breaches are needed. Donahue says several federal agency reports recommend a minimum of 3,300 feet of breach in West Dock and 1,300 feet on the Endicott causeway.

“It’s also just drastic environmental alteration,” added Larry T. Landry, associate director of the center. “You are altering a previously pristine habitat, and doing so dramatically,” Landry said. “On Endicott, 700 feet of breaching has been clearly inadequate.”