Delaware County Times - Gas Prices Driving Williams to Alaska

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Delaware County Times - Gas Prices Driving Williams to Alaska

As fuel prices continue to dominate the political landscape this election season, Republican 7th Congressional District candidate W. Craig Williams announced Wednesday he will be heading to Alaska July 13 to investigate opening up drilling for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR.
Williams, a Concord attorney, discussed his upcoming trip and "Bridge to the Future" domestic-energy plan at the Liberty gas station on Burmont Road, an apropos venue where one gallon of regular unleaded gasoline costs $4.15.
That plan includes exploring the availability of oil in the coastal shelf, oil shale in the Rocky Mountains, and building new refineries, as well as investing in nuclear power plants, using new clean-burning coal technologies, increasing conservation and funding renewable energy research.

"I do not believe the current political culture in Washington, D.C., is serving the people of our nation," said Williams, who faces U.S. Rep. Joseph Sestak, D-7, of Edgmont, in the November general election.

"The current energy crisis we are in today is a perfect example of the failures of our elected officials, Republican and Democrat alike," said Williams.

He chastised past government officials for sitting on their hands as petroleum resources in the country dwindled, failing to develop new sources of energy even in the face of crises such as the 1970s oil embargo by Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) nations.

"We knew in the late 1970s that we were headed toward an energy train wreck," he said. "When the immediate crisis passed, our elected officials went back to burying their collective heads in the sand. We did not invest as heavily as we should have as a nation in alternative renewable energy resources."

That is why Williams said the country now needs to secure what resources it has left, to act as a 20- to 30-year buffer while alternative and renewable resources are developed for mass consumption.

"Today, less than 6 percent of our nation's energy production comes from renewable energy resources such as hydroelectric, solar and wind power," he said. "We need to provide a bridge to tomorrow that provides us with access to domestic energy resources such as exist in ANWR so that we can implement sustainable, affordable and more widespread renewable energy policies and technology."

His opponent would agree with the latter, though not the former. Sestak has voted for bills promoting investment in renewable energy sources and a clean energy economy, for which he is being recognized Monday, with a "100 percent report card" from PennEnvironment.

"While drilling is part of the solution, we cannot just drill our way out of this problem," Sestak spokeswoman Alix Gerz said in a statement.

"To drill effectively, however, we need to recognize that there are 68 million acres - 2,000 of them right here in Pennsylvania - that the U.S. government has already leased to oil companies and that have been approved for drilling. While some suggest that we open up land in ... ANWR, there are already 3.8 million leased, but unused, acres in the Alaska National Petroleum Reserve. The oil companies should use some of their $1.27 trillion of profits to increase domestic oil production by producing from these areas where they have nearly 10,000 stockpiled and unused drilling permits, which would have a near-term impact on gas prices."

Last week, Sestak joined House Democrats in voting for the "Use It or Lose It" bill, developed with a House Natural Resources Committee report that "68 million acres of leased but currently inactive federal land and waters could produce an additional 4.8 million billion barrels of oil and 44.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas."

The bill, which did not receive the two-thirds majority it needed to pass, would have nearly doubled total U.S. oil production, increased gas production by 75 percent, cut U.S. oil imports by more than a third and forced production of more than six times the amount of oil estimated to be in ANWR, according to the report.

Republican leadership laughed off the report - which nonetheless garnered 223 votes in the House - as based on flawed data.

In a letter to legislative leaders, American Association of Petroleum Geologists President Will Green also warned that, "Policies that increase exploration costs, decrease the available time to properly evaluate leases, and restrict access to federal lands and the Outer Continental Shelf" could actually hurt Americans in the short term, not help them.

Once a lease for a swath of land is secured, he added, a comprehensive and expensive process of mapping, testing, drilling and construction takes place, usually over many years, during which the land is classified as "non-producing."

Williams, meanwhile, stressed the relative smallness of the proposed drilling site - about 2,000 acres (a little more than 3 square miles) in the ANWR Coastal Plain - in relation to the total 19.6-million-acre reserve.

Williams said his trip is essentially fact-finding to determine the effects drilling would have on wildlife and native peoples in the region.

A nationwide survey released Tuesday from the Pew Research Center conducted June 18-29 among 2,004 adults found Williams is not alone in his desire to explore drilling in the arctic.

Half of Americans now support that move, up from 42 percent in February, according to the poll.

Those rating energy exploration as more important than conservation also jumped 12 points, from 35 percent in February to 47 percent, according to the poll.

The proportion saying it is more important to increase energy conservation and regulation dropped 10 points, from 55 percent to 45 percent.

The U.S. currently consumes 20.41 million barrels of oil per day, 11.66 million barrels per day of which are imported.

A 1998 report from the U.S. Geological Survey found a 95 percent probability that at least 5.7 billion barrels of oil are recoverable from ANWR and a 5 percent probability that at least 16 billion barrels of oil are recoverable.
There remains about 120 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in the rest of the country, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates.

According to an analysis of ANWR by EIA, oil and natural gas production at the refuge would likely peak at about 780,000 additional barrels per day in 2027 or 2028 and would decrease U.S. dependence on foreign oil in 2030 by about 3 percent.

That analysis assumes a 10-year period between passage of enabling legislation and actual production start-up at the site, due to constraints such as severe weather hampering drilling data collection and heavy equipment shipping overseas.

According to the most recent EIA estimates, world marketed energy consumption is expected to increase by 57 percent between 2004 and 2030.

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