Key Senator Defends ANWR Strategy
By REUTERS
Published: March 7, 2005
Filed at 0:50 a.m. ET
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate Energy Committee chairman on Sunday defended Republican plans to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge through a provision in a pending budget bill, although critics say the strategy is underhanded.
Sen. Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, told a news conference that budget bills were not subject to parliamentary rules requiring 60 votes to break a filibuster, a hurdle environmentalists who oppose oil development in the Alaska refuge want to keep intact.
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``We say, 'Why not a majority?' It's going to turn out if they have 51 votes, they win. We don't have ANWR. If we have 51 votes, we win. We have ANWR,'' he said. ``I think that's pretty American. I don't think we're denying anybody anything.''
Domenici was among five pro-drilling Republican senators, two Cabinet members and a White House official who traveled over the weekend to the North Slope to observe winter conditions and the oil industry's seasonal operations there.
The Arctic refuge, a haven for caribou, musk ox, polar bears and other Arctic wildlife, is believed to be potentially rich with oil. A keystone of the Bush administration's energy policy is to open the refuge's 1.5 million-acre (607,000-hectare) coastal plain to oil drilling.
Environmentalists and some Alaska Natives are fiercely opposed, saying the area is critical for calving caribou and other wildlife.
Domenici said a budget bill including provisions anticipating government revenues from oil leases sold in the refuge would likely be on the Senate floor within two weeks. Two to three months after that, he said, a bill would be produced from his committee with specific language authorizing ANWR development.
Despite the withdrawal of Alaska's two major oil producers from a campaign group urging ANWR development, Domenici said he was confident oil companies would be eager to develop the refuge's coastal plain if given the chance.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who also went on the trip, said she agreed the oil companies would consider ANWR if it was made available to them. But it was not their responsibility to decide what areas of the nation were open to development, she said.
``What is at stake is the energy future of the United States,'' she said. ``The big oil companies don't have the energy independence of America as a top concern for them. They'll go anywhere.''
But one opponent of ANWR development said assumptions about industry interest in the refuge were vastly exaggerated.
The pending budget provision about ANWR leasing revenues assumes exploration rights will sell for $3,333 to $6,000 an acre, far above the $50-an-acre average spent by industry over the past two decades on the North Slope, said Peter Van Tuyn, an Anchorage environmental attorney.
``The budget process isn't about revenues that are speculative, down the road. It's about revenues that will be there next year,'' he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/po...rgy-alaska.html