Murkowski Presses DOE, DOI Nominees on Alaska Priorities
Washington, DC – This week, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources (ENR) Committee held a hearing to consider the nominations of William Doffermyre to be Solicitor at the Department of the Interior, Kyle Haustveit to be an Assistant Secretary of Energy (Fossil Energy), and Catherine Jereza to be an Assistant Secretary of Energy (Electricity). U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), former Chairman of the committee, pressed the nominees on carbon capture projects on Alaska’s North Slope, the need to improve transmission in the Railbelt region and across the state, and the need for the Interior to return to following the law as written by Congress.
Just prior to the hearing, ENR held a business meeting and favorably reported four nominations to the full Senate for confirmation. Murkowski supported all four nominees, including her former ENR staff member, Tristan Abbey, to lead the Energy Information Administration and Leslie Beyer to be Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management at Interior.
Click here to watch the Senator’s full line of questioning.
The full transcript of Murkowski’s comments during this week’s ENR hearing is below.
TRANSCRIPT
Murkowski: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I apologize that I’ve missed most of your testimony. My commitment to you is that I'm going back to read it all. Some very quick questions today, as we're running between different committees, first to Mr. Haustveit: carbon capture. We’ve got some key projects that we’re anticipating as we’re looking to process North Slope natural gas. This is central to the viability of our Alaska LNG project. DOE has already awarded funding for two CCS initiatives. One is ASRC’s CarbonSAFE hub and then a direct air capture feasibility study. Both of these are in limbo right now where we’re concerned that they may be on a DOE list of cuts going to the White House. It’s something, again, that we have been working with industry in a very collaborative way, working with the agencies, and we look at this piece as really very strategic for the energy initiative that we have up there. I know you’re not in yet, but I’m just asking for your commitment to look critically at this, (and) to have the ability to defend these Alaska-based projects given their strategic energy importance.
Haustveit: Senator, thank you for the question. As you stated, I’m not in, so I don’t know the details, but I do commit to looking at projects that are part of the Department. Carbon capture, especially when used for extracting additional hydrocarbons, is something that I’m passionate about. Prudhoe Bay benefited greatly from reinjection because you didn’t have a place to put the gas for a long time, and you reinjected it; it resulted in higher recovery.
Murkowski: We’re still doing that.
Haustveit: My home state is recovering somewhere between 10% and 15% of the oil in place. And CO2 is a potential solution to inject into the reservoir to recover more oil. We’ve got tremendous resources in our country. Alaska is blessed greatly with resources across the entire state. And CO2, if available at affordable levels, can be a great injectant, can be a great solution to recover more of that resource.
Murkowski: We look forward to sharing more of the details about these projects and the opportunity to show you firsthand.
Haustveit: Thank you, Senator.
Murkowski: Let me turn to you, Ms. Jereza. As you know, the map shows we’re not connected. We’re not connected by geography to the Lower 48 and our grid is not part of a continental grid. And so we have some unique reliability and affordability challenges. Our grid is what we call the Railbelt. So, it goes up as far as the railroad and then kind of comes back down the other way. But we have aging infrastructure, aging transmission infrastructure, that we’re dealing with. We’ve got limited redundancy. We’ve got high cost to our ratepayers. So, I need you, and again, same point that I just made previously: I understand you’re not there yet—but we have a grid modernization effort that is underway, significant grant funding that came a couple years ago to help us with this integration of the transmission grid, to kind of boost it up, to allow it to take us forward for the next decade or so. So, I just need your commitment to look critically at what our needs are in Alaska, again, when we’re not part of anybody else’s interrelated grid.
Jereza: Senator, it would be my pleasure to do that. I actually was fortunate enough to go to Cordova and see the great innovations that are happening at Cordova, so I can't wait to go back.
Murkowski: Good. You will have that invitation. And finally, Mr. Doffermyre, I know you’ve got a little bit of a connection to Alaska through some of your law school buddies who are very focused on Alaska: Kaleb Froehlich, who is around here, he speaks highly of you, by the way. We saw in the last administration just a torrent of decisions and regulations from Interior that were absolutely, contrary to what we passed into law here in Congress. It was pretty tough. And this was on our petroleum reserve. It was on the non-wilderness portion of the Coastal Plain. It was on the Ambler Access Project, our Public Land Orders, we’ve got a whole list of them. I just need your commitment—and I hope that this is the easiest question that you will ever get: your commitment to ensure that Interior returns to following the law, the law as it is written, if you are confirmed as Solicitor.
Doffermyre: Yes, ma’am.
Murkowski: See how easy that was. I appreciate that, because we feel like we’re pretty clear here in our policies, and then when it is not followed through on the other end, (we have) great frustration. So, I look forward to seeing you keep that commitment. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate the opportunity to blast in at the very end. Thank you.
###
