Murkowski slams EPA Alaska permitting

In testimony before the Energy and Power Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 13, Sen. Lisa Murkowski slammed the Environmental Protection Agency’s failure to issue air quality permits for exploratory drilling on Alaska’s outer continental shelf. Murkowski is the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

EPA’s failure to grant air quality permits for offshore oil and gas leaseholders has held up OCS exploration and development for years, Murkowski said.

“It is indefensible to allow the EPA’s failures to serve as a de-facto veto over the national energy security interests of the outer continental shelf,” Murkowski said. “The air permitting process has been confused and taken advantage of by those who have found the Clean Air Act to be less of an air quality statute and more of a hidden, blunt instrument that can be used to stop energy exploration.”

EPA, the agency with authority over Arctic OCS air permits, has now taken more than five years to deal with air permits requested by Arctic leaseholders. By comparison, the Department of the Interior, with air quality permit jurisdiction in the Gulf of Mexico, takes an average of six weeks to issue a permit in the Gulf, Murkowski said.

In February Shell, the company that has been leading the drive to explore in the Alaska Arctic OCS, deferred its planned 2011 Beaufort Sea drilling into 2012 because the Environmental Appeals Board had remanded the company’s air quality permit back to EPA for reconsideration.

“Our resources belong to the American people, not any corporation and certainly not any federal agency,” Murkowski said. “It cannot be the EPA’s decision, nor the Environmental Appeals Board’s decision, that determines whether Americans benefit from the tremendous resources in Alaska’s OCS.”

—Alan Bailey