Alaska’s congressional delegation vows fight after federal moves on ANWR, OCS

If tickets could be sold to Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s hearings in March on the Interior Department’s annual appropriation, it would be a sell-out crowd as Secretary Sally Jewell is sure to come in for a roasting. The Secretary has blocked a medical evacuation road for King Cove, in southwest Alaska, placed large areas of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off limits to oil and gas exploration, and has recommended wilderness status for the bulk of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, including its coastal plain that has potential for large new oil and gas discoveries. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, an agency of the Interior Department, is reported to be pressing costly mitigation measures on ConocoPhillips on the company’s planned Greater Moose’s Tooth-1, or GMT-1, oil project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. If BLM’s actions make the project uneconomic it will lose the 30,000 barrels per day of oil production that GMT-1 could produce for the trans-Alaska pipeline system, currently running three-quarters empty. The ANWR decision, however, had truly inflamed Alaska leaders and the state’s congressional delegation...more