Alaska gov backs plan for drilling offshore
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — President Trump’s plan to open America’s oceans to petroleum drilling was welcomed in the state where most lease sales could be held.
Alaska Gov. Bill Walker, an independent facing re-election this year, embraced Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s proposed 19 lease sales in the state, including six in the potentially oil rich but environmentally sensitive Arctic Ocean waters.
“The Department of Interior’s draft five-year offshore leasing plan is an important step toward allowing Alaskans to responsibly develop our natural resources as we see fit,” he said Thursday.
The Beaufort Sea, off Alaska’s north coast, holds an estimated 8.9 billion barrels of oil, and the Chukchi, off Alaska’s northwest coast, holds an estimated 15.4 billion barrels.
Arctic waters also provide habitat for threatened polar bears, walruses and bowhead whales and are the home of Inupiat villages. Hanging over any Arctic water sales is the question of whether spills — which drilling critics say are inevitable — can be cleaned up in icechoked or ice-covered water along coastline with negligible infrastructure compared to the Gulf of Mexico and other drilling regions.
Walker, overseeing an oil-dependent state desperate to find ways to refill the trans-Alaska pipeline that once transported 2.1 million barrels daily but averaged 527,000 in 2017, took hope from Zinke’s announcement, and said he looked forward to working with the federal government to unleash Alaska’s energy potential while taking into account environmental and safety concerns.