Murkowski: Interior should consider extending Shell’s Arctic drilling window

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said Thursday that Interior Department regulators should be open to extending the amount of time that Royal Dutch Shell is given to conduct planned exploratory drilling in Arctic waters this summer.

Shell hopes to begin long-planned drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off Alaska’s coast during the brief ice-free period this summer, but it still waiting for enough sea ice to clear and final drilling permits, among other hold-ups.

The company’s federally approved exploration plan states that in the Chukchi Sea, Shell must cease drilling into hydrocarbon-bearing zones 38 days before ice again encroaches onto the drilling areas, which means a late-September deadline because Interior estimates that ice will arrive Nov. 1 at the earliest.

“I think they should be open to extending it, and I believe they will if it is determined that the ice conditions are such that there will be an adequate period of time ... for Shell to get out of the water,” Murkowski, the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said of the September date.

“If the folks at [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and all those that are examining the ice and the conditions up there look at the situation on the ground in, let’s just say, mid-September and say wow, ice is much further off, it is slower in forming, conditions look like it is going to allow for a longer period, I think the Department of Interior clearly left the door open for that,” she added.

Shell must cease all operations in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas by Oct. 31 under the plan that Interior approved.