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House votes to open refuge to oil drilling
By DAVID IVANOVICH Dec. 19, 2005
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - House lawmakers approved a bill as one of their last acts of an all-night session today that opened the way for oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northern Alaska.
House GOP leaders quelled a rebellion by moderate Republicans unhappy with the strategy to attach the drilling language to a Defense Department spending bill.
The battle could become even more intense later this week in the Senate, where Democrats have vowed to try to strip the drilling language from the legislation.
The wildlife refuge is believed to hold some 10 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil, the largest untapped oil deposit left onshore in the United States. But environmentalists fear drilling there would spoil a spectacular wilderness area.
Opening a portion of the refuge to oil and gas exploration has been the linchpin of the White House's strategy to boost domestic oil production and has been a major objective of the nation's oil companies dating to the Carter administration.
During negotiations between the House and Senate over a bill to allocate money for U.S. troops, Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, chairman of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, insisted on adding the drilling language to the "must-pass" legislation.
Since the bill also includes disaster relief for victims of Hurricane Katrina and avian flu preparedness funds, drilling supporters hoped opponents wouldn't risk voting against it.
To further entice lawmakers, the bill would dedicate 80 percent of an estimated $5 billion in federal revenues from leasing acreage in the refuge to states ravaged by hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. Later, a portion of the royalties also would go to Gulf Coast states, while another slice would be used to help low-income families pay their heating bills.
Over in the Senate, Democrats planned to object to the provision's inclusion in the spending bill, arguing that oil drilling is not germane to defense activities.
So Republicans devised a maneuver to change the Senate rules to allow the measure to tag along on the bill.
If the Senate votes to allow the provision to remain on the bill, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and other Democrats have promised to attempt a filibuster to try to block the bill.
Stevens would need to find 60 votes to break a filibuster. And Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said Sunday evening that drilling supporters have the votes to get past the filibuster and pass the bill.
But an angry Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., warned the legislation might not get that far. "We'll find out," Reid said.
The inclusion of the provision on the defense spending bill has forced many drilling opponents into a difficult position.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has described attaching refuge drilling to the bill "disgusting." But McCain would have trouble voting against the final bill.
"I can't not support funding of the war," McCain said on ABC's This Week . "We're in a war. Americans are fighting and dying today. But the process in the Congress is broken. It's terribly broken."
The refuge was created nearly half a century ago and expanded to its current size, roughly comparable to South Carolina, in 1980.
At the time of that expansion, lawmakers earmarked a 1.5 million-acre section along Alaska's coastal plain for possible exploration, an area known as Section 1002.
A decade ago, lawmakers passed a bill authorizing drilling in Section 1002, but then-President Clinton vetoed it.
The current proposal would allow companies to drill in Section 1002 but limits the surface area that could be disturbed to 2,000 acres.
Proponents argue that if drilling is permitted oil could begin flowing within seven to 10 years.
"We simply have to increase our domestic production so we're less reliant on imported oil," argued Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. "It just makes sense to me that we ought to look to America."