U.S. unveils plan to manage huge Alaskan oil reserve

The U.S. federal government on Wednesday announced a plan to manage energy drilling on part of Alaska's North Slope, with the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve to be divided between areas available for oil and gas leases and those that are protected from development. Under Wednesday's blueprint 11.8 million acres would be open for development, which are estimated to hold 549 million barrels of economically recoverable oil and 8.7 trillion cubic feet of economically recoverable natural gas. Murkowski, the top Republican on the Senate Energy Committee, takes the view that the reserve's legal purpose is to provide petroleum to the United States to ensure the nation's energy security. The administration's plan "locks up 83.5 percent of the likely natural gas in the reserve. That is totally unacceptable," she said. The reserve is the largest single tract of public land in the country, roughly the size of Indiana, and is managed by the Bureau of Land Management...more