Democrats seek to kill oil drilling in budget bill

By Tom Doggett

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Senate Democrats will try to remove
language from a pending budget bill that calls for the
government to raise billions of dollars in leasing fees from
oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Republican leaders, with White House support, are using the
massive 2007 budget legislation to give oil companies access to
the refuge, because budget bills can’t be filibustered under
Senate rules.

The legislation assumes about $6 billion in leasing fees
and bonus bids would be paid by energy companies to drill in
the refuge. The federal government could keep half the money to
fund various programs and the other half would go Alaska.

Opening ANWR is a key part of the Bush administration’s
national energy policy. The White House says tapping the
refuge’s potential 16 billion barrels of crude would boost
domestic petroleum supplies and help reduce U.S. reliance on
foreign oil imports.

Democrats John Kerry of Massachusetts and Maria Cantwell of
Washington late on Wednesday were set to offer an amendment to
strip the ANWR language from the budget bill. A vote on the
amendment was expected later in the week.

Many Senate Democrats, and a handful of Republicans, oppose
drilling in the refuge. They argue the amount of oil in ANWR is
not enough to justify threatening the area’s polar bears,
caribou and other wildlife.

In an e-mail to his supporters on Wednesday, Kerry said the
Bush administration was “so beholden to the big oil and gas
companies that turning over America’s most precious natural
resources on a fool’s errand search for the last drop of oil is
all they can think about.”

Democrats also doubt the government would be able to raise
the $6 billion in fees, as called for in the budget bill, based
on the much lower prices companies have paid in recent years to
lease tracts in other areas of Alaska’s North Slope.

“It is irresponsible to base the country’s budget on highly
speculative and dubious projections of lease revenues for the
coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” all nine
Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee said in a letter last
week to the panel’s Republican chairman, Judd Gregg.

Twenty-four House Republicans also sent a letter to the
House Budget Committee chairman, Republican Jim Nussle, urging
him to keep Arctic refuge drilling out of the 2007 budget bill.

The administration has failed every year to convince
Congress to give energy companies access to the ANWR.

Drilling supporters hope that consumer anger over high
gasoline prices and rising oil imports, many from countries
that are not that friendly to the United States, will encourage
more lawmakers to vote for drilling in the refuge.

ANWR stretches across 19 million acres (7.7 million
hectares) in the northeast corner of Alaska. But the White
House wants to offer only 1.5 million acres in the refuge’s
coastal plain for oil and natural gas exploration leases.

The Interior Department estimates the refuge could hold
between 5.7 billion and 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

If the refuge was opened to drilling, it would take about
eight years before the area reached full production of 800,000
to 1 million barrels per day, the Energy Department said.