Gone But Not Forgotten: Energy, Oil and Alaska

President Bush signed the 2005 Energy Bill on Monday, partially fulfilling a 2000 election promise; conspicuous by its absence, the bill fails to address controversial drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NN) acknowledged that the bill would not have passed Congress had it included Arctic drilling; he also said he was planning to bypass the authorization process by including a provision for drilling in the federal budget. (Unlike many state budgets, the federal budget does not require authorizing legislation for line-items.)

The US currently consumes about 20 million barrels of oil a day (7.3 billion barrels a year); only 8 million barrels are produced domestically each day. A 1998 USGS estimate suggests that the ANWR 1002 area could technically produce a total of 4.3 - 11.8 billion barrels of oil (95 percent probability) -- equivalent to 6 - 18 months consumption. [USGS PDF: part 1, part 2, part 3] Crude-oil prices reached a new high above $63 a barrel on Monday.

Editorial support for the bill has been lackluster. The bill's tortured history includes challenges from NGOs and Congress -- rebuffed by federal court -- to discover details of closed-door meetings between Vice President Cheney and oil executives in 2001. In February 2003, GAO Comptroller David Walker said:

Despite GAO's conviction that the district court's decision was incorrect, further pursuit of the [energy task force] information would require investment of significant time and resources over several years... [noting that the] court's decision is confined to the unique circumstances posed by this particular case and does not preclude GAO from filing suit on a different matter, involving different facts and circumstances, in the future.

Tags: ANWR, Energy, Politics