Posted on 05/04/2006 1:10:45 PM PDT by thackney
WASHINGTON--President Bush talked forcefully about the need to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge during a meeting with members of Congress on Wednesday, according to Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. Bush asked the senators and representatives for a variety of measures to combat rising petroleum and energy prices. Stevens and 14 colleagues met with Bush for almost an hour.
"I commented at length about ANWR myself, as a matter of fact," Stevens told Alaska reporters late Wednesday afternoon.
Stevens said he expects the U.S. House of Representatives will approve ANWR drilling in the next week or two but he hasn't seen any indication that the Senate would support the idea this year.
The closest recent vote came Dec. 21, when 57 senators voted to stop a filibuster of a defense spending bill to which Stevens had attached an ANWR-drilling amendment. Drilling backers needed 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster and hold a vote on the bill itself.
Of the 57 opponents of the filibuster, four were Democrats. Among the 43 supporters of the filibuster, two were Republicans.
Today, "there are at least two Democratic senators who are talking to us," Stevens said, in addition to the previous Democratic supporters.
Public pressure could create more supporters, he indicated. Recent polls show growing support for drilling in ANWR, he said.
Stevens said ANWR oil can't get to market in the short-term. But developing it would combat higher prices in the longer-term, he said.
The federal government's Energy Information Administration has said that ANWR oil is unlikely to affect gasoline prices much, though. That's because the oil would represent a small sliver of worldwide crude supply, which has averaged 84 million barrels per day this year.
"They're just misinformed," Stevens said of the EIA's forecast.
ANWR could produce a million barrels per day for 30 years, he said. "That's a significant amount of oil," he said.
Still, he said a few minutes later that the price of gasoline is mostly dependent upon crude oil prices, which in turn are "primarily set by foreign governments" that control the vast majority of world supplies. Right now, those foreign governments see that U.S. demand for gasoline has actually increased, despite record high prices, Stevens observed.
"That's a message to those foreign producers," he said.
The United States needs to counter the foreign control and high prices on several fronts, he said.
Stevens said he backs efforts to give the administration authority to tinker with fuel economy standards for passenger vehicles, which to date Congress has controlled. Stevens said the administration is better able to set appropriate standards for vehicle classes.
Stevens has also drafted an anti-price gouging bill for gasoline and said he would work more on it after talking with state attorneys general.
The senator said he also gave Bush a pitch for more oil drilling off Alaska's continental shelf, in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and in Cook Inlet.
Stevens wants Bush to lift the administration's policy against offering oil leases in Bristol Bay, as well. Congress has already removed the statutory ban on such leases, and Gov. Frank Murkowski has requested that Bush reverse the administration's policy. Stevens said he expects Bush will do so.
Alaska has half the nation's coal, too, Stevens observed.
Finally, Alaska could soon supply the nation with natural gas via a pipeline to the Midwest, Stevens said.
"The president asked me where that was, actually," Stevens said. He said he explained the negotiations with the Murkowski administration and the Legislature. Bush didn't seem to have been briefed recently on the situation, Stevens said.
Washington, D.C., reporter Sam Bishop can be reached at (202) 662-8721 or sbishop@newsminer.com .
Bush pushes ANWR drilling
ANWR would look great in pumps.
They should have known that sooner or later, unchallenged lies become reality in people's minds...
LOL!!!
About Fricking damn time!!!
The Dems are pushing twice as hard against it, all while maintaining that the Bush admin is doing nothing about our dependence on foreign oil.
The trick is developing competion and some sort of subsidy for the weak but essential competitor. We need the picture of trucks backed up at the entrance to refineries to get the idea across it's a capacity and production issue, not an inventory issue. And the only way to increase capacity is to show the bottleneck on TV.
Auction leases to independent drillers every day the price stays above the "peg". Set the peg and encourage the speculators to bid their futures down to the peg by selling prime 99 year leases. It would take a third party to get this kind of competition in place. The two parties today are locked up.
I never understood the claim that a million barrels a day would not make a difference in price. That is fairly typical of the size of change OPEC makes to affect price. Sometimes more, but sometimes less.
http://www.opec.org/home/quotas/productionLevels.pdf
It is true OPEC could just cut back by a million barrels. But if we collect royalties and taxes on a million more barrels per day, and they collect less, it still sounds like a good plan.
'bout sums it up...
I agree. bttt
Exactly.
We have smaller "independent" oil companies buying leases on the North Slope in Alaska. Kerr-McGee and Pioneer have recently gotten into the North Slope oil business. We need to open up the rest of NPRA and ANWR's coastal plain and we will have more of them. There is no need to artificially "set the peg". The can and do compete on the market today, what little is available.
Like it. If the Donks resisted they'd all but destroy their chances in the midterms. The GOP should show some spine and brains (assuming they have any) and do it.
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