RDC gets DC update from Alaska’s senators

With Republicans in majority in Congress, Murkowski and Sullivan review work they are doing in Senate on issues important to state

Kristen Nelson

Petroleum News

There are challenges, but so much opportunity the people of Alaska should not be discouraged, Lisa Murkowski, the state’s senior U.S. senator, told the annual meeting of the Resource Development Council in Anchorage June 30.

Murkowski, a Republican, chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and also chairs the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Because of those seats, the state holds the purse strings for many of the agencies which impact Alaska, Murkowski said, and the also resource policy chair.

“We are incredibly well positioned on resource policy within the Senate right now, probably better than at any other time that I can remember,” she said.

On the appropriations side Murkowski said the subcommittee hasn’t had a bill move through the committee in six years, and is now moving forward with a bill that does not allow funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rule, Waters of the United States.

Another example Murkowski cited was reallocation of EPA funding, moving that funding out of legal and regulatory areas which would be advancing the Clean Power Plant or WOTUS, with the money instead put into areas such as geologic mapping and permitting for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

The Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which Murkowski chairs, is working on an energy bill, aiming to move the first such bill since 2007.

She said one of her primary goals is Outer Continental Shelf revenue sharing for Alaska - and for that, 60 votes are needed, so what’s been proposed is revenue sharing not just for Alaska, but also for the Gulf and Mid-Atlantic states.

Murkowski said they are also pushing agencies to make sure Shell has the opportunity to do exploratory drilling this year in the Chukchi Sea. “We’re almost there ... but we continue to see the opposition to reasonable development of American resources.”

All of this is ambitious, she said, with the administration “against us, on almost everything we want to do,” the threat of vetoes and with going into an election year.

It’s easy to find reasons not to do things, Murkowski said, but the state has “riches and resources and wealth that other states can only imagine” and “rallying together, working together, dreaming big - that’s what we do in Alaska.”

Sen. Dan Sullivan, also a Republican, and the state’s junior senator, elected just last year, said it’s necessary to make the argument for responsible resource development and then win that argument.

Benefits of resource development are varied, Sullivan said. Local benefits include the Cook Inlet renaissance, with energy for Southcentral residents, while national benefits include resource development driving recent economic growth, and international and national security benefits, with energy, along with the nation’s military might, a new instrument of national power.

He said federal regulations have been estimated to cost $1.8 trillion a year, $50,000 per household in the U.S. If regulations were an economy, Sullivan said, at almost $2 trillion a year it would be the world’s 10th largest economy.

He said a bill was being introduced which would require agencies to sunset existing regulations in the same amount as new regulations they implement.

On the EPA’s new Waters of the United States regulations, Congressman Don Young pushed through a bill to repeal WOTUS regulations, Murkowski was squashing appropriations to fund the new rule, he was holding hearings in Alaska on WOTUS and states, including Alaska, have sued to block implementation, Sullivan said.

The senator, with a background in the U.S. Marine Corps, said the state was surrounded by those opposed to responsible resource development, and citing the words of a Marine Corps lieutenant general in the Chosin Reservoir campaign during the Korean War, said with our enemies surrounding us, “they can’t get away from us this time.”