Mark Begich

We hope to see, as it moves forward, some good progress.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

As we develop more gas supplies in the country, moving gas/LNG from this country to markets, the Pacific Rim, will be a whole new opening.

I think it is great what TOTE is doing. Of course, you know, from Alaska we love to sell gas, so we are all OK with this.

There is probably going to be some incredible impact on pricing.

LNG is one of the safer products when it comes to petroleum products.

That is real. That is not a pipedream. It is happening.

This is a very critical program for the Alaska Native community.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for holding this hearing and an opportunity to kind of explore the issues of remote areas.

I think public funding, private-public partnerships, equity, these are all really--I mean, they are important long-range.

You can count on our ability and whatever we can do to help.

Ultimately, though, we hope that the White House work on a national strategy... will help to reinforce those priorities.

Thank you, Senator, for allowing this testimony.

It has been a sea change practically in how things have been done

Sequestration is an issue for all of us, and the Coast Guard, particularly District 17, is working hard to figure out how best to manage the risks and the impacts of sequestration.

And do you feel the other countries are participating in a way that is going to produce an end product?

Thank you for testifying. I appreciate you doing this by VTC.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm just testing. Can you hear me okay, sir?

We do need to make it sustainable through a number of different operators

Do you feel like 2014, again, anticipating that Shell will be back in the waters, as well as potentially Conoco Phillips, that you are prepared even under the sequestration levels that we are at, or is that a risk factor that we have to…

The highest probability of incidents is clearly in the increased maritime traffic across the board.

So safety requirements.

The timetable of how you do this permitting is critical, because you can literally be off a few months and change a year or a year-and-a-half of development

Do you think you have the capacity where you are and some tweaks need to be added to it?

We introduced a piece of legislation to put together an Arctic port development strategy with loan guarantees up to $3 billion worth.