Bush's Interior Dept Pushes With Plan To Drill For Oil Off Virginia

The Washington Post reports:

The Interior Department will announce a proposal Monday to allow oil and gas drilling in federal waters near Virginia that are currently off-limits and permit new exploration in Alaska's Bristol Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, according to people who have seen or been told about drafts of the plan.

The department issued a news release yesterday that was lacking details but said that it had finished a five-year plan that will include a "major proposal for expanded oil and natural gas development on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf." Department officials declined to describe the plan.

Congress would still have to agree to open areas currently off-limits before any drilling could take place off Virginia's coast. Every year since 1982, after an oil spill off Santa Barbara, Calif., Congress has reaffirmed a moratorium on drilling off the nation's Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Last year, after a vigorous push by drilling advocates, Congress opened new waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

As Washington is all about compromise and making deals, I have one for Democrats in Congress:

Since the Democrats in office don't have the stomachs or the will to impeach Bush and Cheney (and it's making them crazy to have the base on their backs about it everytime they turn around), how about Democrats' guarantee that nothing Bush or the Republicans propose for the remainder of Bush's term gets made into law?

It's not like the Democrats had any plans to get anything done anyway, given that the 2008 campaign began so preternaturally early (the day after they won control over the Congress in the 2006 midterms), and almost all of the Democratic candidates are spending most of their time campaigning outside of Washington.

New Plan Afoot To Bypass Congress's Ban & Drill Oil In ANWR

If it's not the Bush administration's ceaseless efforts to grab power over the other two co-equal branches of government, it's Republicans in those other branches assisting in their own demise.

Not for nothing, though.

ANWR
Subhankar Banerjee, physicist at Los Alamos

Anchorage Daily News reports:

U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens on Monday tossed out a new approach for opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Make it part of the nation's emergency stockpile of oil.

The idea came up during a nearly hour-long briefing for news reporters in Anchorage. Alaska's senior senator also talked about the war in Iraq, the Alaska gas pipeline and the interim U.S. attorney.

Stevens, wearing a casual brown shirt and no tie, said he was struck by a Sunday column in The Washington Post that analyzed President Bush's call to expand the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

The stockpile consists of about 700 million barrels of federal-government-owned crude stored for a national emergency in huge salt caverns in Louisiana and Texas. The president can release it if commercial oil supplies are disrupted, and it also can be drawn down for other nonemergency reasons.

Stevens said his staff and Sen. Lisa Murkowski's have been reviewing the president's proposal, publicized last month in his State of the Union speech, to buy more oil for the reserve.

"We came up with the thought 'Why not ask that they add ANWR to the petroleum reserve?' And now this op-ed piece says the same thing," Stevens said.

The refuge lies in the northeast corner of Alaska. Its coastal plain is considered the nation's best onshore prospect for a major oil discovery. It also is an area prized by environmentalists nationally. Efforts in Congress to open the coastal plain to oil development have failed repeatedly over the past three decades.

In his column, Gal Luft, head of the energy security think tank Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, said "reframing the issue to cast the refuge as an emergency stockpile rather than a source of production might well change the politics."

Congress could compensate Alaskans by leasing the oil for a set amount of time, after which the state could sell it, Luft said in the column, under the headline "An Oil Reserve Right at Hand."

Alaskans who have tried to open ANWR to drilling said they haven't heard of this new twist but noted that execution would be very complex.

"I don't understand the concept," was the immediate reaction of Roger Herrera, an oil and gas consultant in Anchorage who has been working on ANWR nearly 30 years.

After giving the idea some quick thought, he said that additional exploration likely would be required to confirm the amount of oil in ANWR, and that equipment would need to be in place so that it could be extracted when needed.

Stevens told reporters he thinks the reserve idea may solve the ANWR issue.

"It is in the national interest to produce from ANWR and certainly by the time we could get it ready to produce it would be a ready reserve," Stevens said.

At a time when we need to be developing alternative energy resources.