An Iñupiaq village corporation from Wainwright is plugging orphaned wells in Wyoming

A construction company owned by an Alaska Native village corporation from the Arctic coast will spend this fall reclaiming an abandoned-well site in Wyoming, under a $209,974 federal contract.

Olgoonik Construction Services, based in Anchorage, will do the work near Newcastle in eastern Wyoming from September through November for the Bureau of Land Management. The job falls under the Federal Orphaned Well Program, the Interior Department's effort to plug abandoned wells on federal land. None of the work is in Alaska, and unlike much Native-corporation federal contracting, this one was competitively bid, with three companies competing for it.

The company behind it has a longer story than the contract suggests. Olgoonik is the ANCSA village corporation for Wainwright, a community of about 600 people, mostly Iñupiat, on the Chukchi Sea coast, and it is owned by more than 1,600 Alaska Native shareholders. It stewards roughly 175,000 acres around the village. Its business once consisted mostly of running Wainwright's hotel, general store and gas station, and it has since grown into a worldwide federal contractor with divisions spanning construction, logistics, environmental and electrical work, and offices from Anchorage to Virginia.

Environmental cleanup is close to home for the corporation. By its own account, an Olgoonik subsidiary was hired to decommission and clean up an aging former federal site near Wainwright, which the corporation later bought back from the government, keeping the surface and subsurface rights. The Wyoming job is the same line of work, a long way south.