Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I have come to the floor this afternoon to mark the 40th anniversary of the first oil moving through the Trans- Alaska Pipeline System. In Alaska, we call it TAPS. This is an 800- mile-long engineering marvel that runs from the North Slope of Alaska to tidewater in Valdez. Forty years is a good, long history. I recognize that, and so this afternoon, in the interest of time, I will abbreviate the history, but I want to start the story of our pipeline in the late 1960s. Believe it or not, this was a pretty bleak moment for oil exploration in Alaska. Despite great promise, many companies had given up on exploration on the North Slope. By some accounts, at that point in time, there were at least 14 dry holes that had been drilled before ARCO and Humble Oil Company decided they were going to sink just one last well. It was actually an ARCO executive who described it ``more as a decision not to cancel a well already scheduled to go ahead.'' That well, Prudhoe Bay State No. 1, would prove to be a game changer for Alaska. We had discovered oil. We discovered oil on the North Slope and a lot of it. We quickly learned that Prudhoe Bay would be one of the largest oilfields in global history, by far the largest ever discovered in the United States. Early estimates, at that time, suggested as much as 9 billion barrels of oil could be recovered from it. We have learned over these intervening 40 years that we so far underestimated that.…”