Oil Industry Must Be Allowed To Tap Alaska, Says Murkowski

With oil prices on the rise due to continued unrest in North Africa, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) released a five-step plan to ween the U.S. off imported oil from the Middle East.

First, the Alaska Republican urged the Obama administration to allow oil companies to explore a 2,000-acre area inside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, as well as the Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

Those areas, according to Murkowski, “hold at least 40 billion barrels of recoverable oil…enough to replace crude imports from the Persian Gulf for nearly 65 years.”

ANWR has been off limits to the oil industry for years, due to restrictions lobbied for by environmental groups and enforced by the federal government. In a floor speech on Thursday, Murkowski pleaded with the administration to allow drilling in that region of her state.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said. “Alaska has huge reserves of oil just waiting to be tapped for the good of the nation.”

The long-time Republican, who narrowly won reelection to the Senate last year after mounting a write-in campaign against conservative opponent Joe Miller, a Tea Party-backed attorney who defeated Murkowski in the state’s GOP primary, also called on the administration to speed up the process of issuing more deepwater drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico.