Delaware County Times - Williams: Oil's Well for Drilling in Alaska

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Delaware County Times - Williams: Oil's Well for Drilling in Alaska

Imagine if you were poor, real poor. And one day you found a gold nugget the size of a Volkswagen on your property.

Suddenly, you could imagine your hard life getting less hard, a better future for your children. But when you went to dig the gold out, a bunch of people showed up to stop you.

They said to you, "Hey, that's not your gold. That's our gold. And we want it left right where it is."

Well, something very much like that is happening in Alaska today in a place called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

And somebody who would like to do something about it is Craig Williams, the Republican challenger to Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak in the 7th District race.

What we're talking about here is not gold, but oil. And a lot of it sits under land owned by the Inupiats, the tribe of Eskimos that has lived there for centuries.

It's not so much that Williams' heart bleeds for the poor Inupiats. America and the rest of the world need oil. There's billions of barrels to be had here in ANWR, but environmentalists and their allies in Congress say it should stay buried in perpetuity.

Williams is just back from a fact-finding tour in ANWR, where he met with tribal leaders, the mayor of Kaktovik, and other citizens who could benefit from opening up a small portion of the refuge for oil drilling.
"We actually sat down with the sitting mayor and a North Slope borough assembly man," said Williams.

When it comes to drilling, he said, "the natives are resoundingly in favor of it." And they have been for 25 years.
I caught up with Williams Tuesday.

"I wanted to see with my own eyes what the terrain looked like," he said. "I wanted to see if we really could do this (drilling) responsibly."
After seeing Prudhoe Bay, Williams had his doubts.
"My heart sagged," he said.

The sheer size of the well pads and how spread out they are made him think there is "no way we can do this in ANWR."

But when he learned that he was looking at 1970s technology, he felt better. Modern drilling techniques allow oil companies to put 60, 6-foot well heads within a 5-acre site.

As for the pristine wilderness of "beautiful mountains, deep valleys and running caribou" that the environmentalists claim to want to protect, that's in the southern part of ANWR. And Williams, who grew up in Anchorage, is all for protecting it.

"The south end of (ANWR) is truly beautiful," he said.
But the little section where the drilling would be done along the coast is a mosquito-infested plain in the summer months and a frozen tundra in the nine-month-long winter.

And that drilling can be done to the environmental standards set not only by the federal government but the Inupiat people.

After all, as former Mayor Benjamin Nageak wrote: "We have the greatest stake possible in seeing that any and all development is done in such a way as to keep this land safe. Because it is our world. It is where we live. It holds the remains of our ancestors. It holds the future of our children."
Even if you don't give a hoot about these particular American Eskimos, it is just plain dumb in this age of $4.20-a-gallon gasoline, not to drill for oil in such remote and plentiful places.

"This is the issue of our time," said Williams. "Everything in our lives is tied to energy and not the least of which is our national security."
Our current oil use is about 15 million barrels a day, and we're able to produce only 5 million.

In the next 10 years, Williams says he would like to see our dependence on foreign oil drop from nearly 70 percent to less than half. Instead of sending hundreds of billions of dollars overseas to foreign countries unfriendly to democracies, we could be keeping a lot of that money here. Throw in a bunch of new nuclear plants, wind and solar energy where plausible, and we'd start solving the problem.

As for the Democrats' "solutions" of conserving energy and forcing oil companies to drill in places where they already have leases, that just ain't gonna' do it. But that's what Sestak tells me we should be doing.
He says there aren't enough oil rigs in the world to bring up crude oil in places currently under lease. He says oil companies need to search for oil where they already have leases. (What he didn't say was that Congress hasn't lifted the ban on off-shore drilling even though challenged to do so by President Bush.)

Sestak asked why oil companies are asking for more areas to be opened up for drilling when they're not drilling in the areas they already can.
The answer seems simple and it is: In a lot of those places oil doesn't exist in great enough quantities to make it cost effective to bring up and get to market.

As for the Inupiats, it didn't sound like Sestak had ever heard of them.
Williams calls part of the Democratic effort to "block and blame" others for doing nothing about our energy needs. Even Sestak admits Congress had been "shooting behind this rabbit" for 30 years.

Polls show that there has been a huge jump in the percentage of Americans who now support drilling off shore for oil (74 percent) and in ANWR (59 percent.) So going to ANWR was a smart move by Williams.
It shows he's not only serious about an issue that his constituents are seriously concerned about, but that he's running a serious campaign.
"Name the time and the place (to debate energy policy)," said Williams, "and I'll be there."

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