Haley Stevens: “the Senator from California could not be more in error about the amount of land on our north arctic shoreline. It is not…”

“the Senator from California could not be more in error about the amount of land on our north arctic shoreline. It is not 95 percent open. There is the naval reserve No. 4. That is 52 percent of the coastline closed. She knows it is closed. Beyond that, the Senator from California comes in with a letter from the Inter-Tribal Council of Alaska. That is a group of dissidents in Alaska, as far as I am concerned. The 100,000-member group of Alaskans known as the Alaska Federation of Natives--my colleague Senator Murkowski had printed in the Record last night their Resolution 9505 absolutely supporting opening of this area to oil and gas drilling. The main thing is, in 1985 it was drilled pursuant to a law passed in 1980 to drill a test well to see if the area could produce oil and gas. The exact results have been classified, but we know it does have the largest basin on the North American continent. If it is drilled, we expect it to produce enormous amounts of oil. One estimate I have before me is the total expected reserves for oil and gas in nongas liquids from Alaska, not taking into account the price per barrel, is 32.5 billion to 69.36 billion barrels. When they first told us about the discovery in the Arctic known as Prudhoe Bay, they said the estimate was about a billion barrels. Last year, we produced the 17 billionth barrel, and it is still producing. As a consequence, we face a process of discrimination. We are crying to be treated equally.”