North Dakota’s Republican senator is hosting the ranking member of the Senate Energy Committee for a two-day-tour of the wildly successful fracking operation in the Bakken Region of his home state.
Together, Sens. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) — representing the second and third largest oil-producing states in the nation — hope to fine-tune a strategy to push energy independence in the upper chamber.
“As the ranking member of the Senate Energy Committee and Alaska’s senior senator, she understands the great potential of our nation’s vast energy resources and recognizes the need to implement sound legal, tax and regulatory policies to fully develop them,” Hoeven said. “A pro-growth energy agenda marks the path to national energy security, a growing national economy, lower gas prices for consumers and good jobs for the American people.”
Murkowski and Hoeven began today touring oil and natural gas production and associated sites, including an oil rig, gas plant and rail station, to review the technological advances being used to recover oil and gas from the Bakken shale.
Hoeven introduced and Murkowski cosponsoredthe Domestic Energy and Jobs Act of 2012, while Hoeven co-sponsored Murkowski’s OPEN Act to expand offshore energy production.
House Republicans have also held up the Bakken reserve as leading to an employment boom in North Dakota while most of the country struggles to recover from recession.
“It’s important to see firsthand the places that are making our nation more energy independent. My trip to North Dakota will be my fourth visit this year to a ‘frontier’ energy producing area,” Murkowski said. “In each of these promising regions – the Gulf of Mexico, the Marcellus, the Arctic, and the Bakken – it’s clear that we have the collective resources to meet far more of our energy needs with domestic production, but the federal government is creating unique problems in each place.”
“Technology has caught up with demand and is helping demonstrate that our energy challenges have nothing to do with scarcity and a lot to do with public perception and government policy choices,” she said.
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