Key Republicans in the Senate, led by Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-AK), reportedly are expanding their options for energy legislation.

In addition to possibly introducing their own scaled-down energy bill, as Murkowski and his colleagues have been promising to do for weeks now, Republican senators also are considering just simply endorsing the comprehensive energy legislation that the House passed in August.

That bill, H.R. 4, would open the door to oil and natural gas drilling in the coastal region of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and would provide producers and energy consumers with $33 billion in tax incentives, as well as promote conservation, energy efficiency, environmental safeguards, renewable fuel production and traditional energy production initiatives.

“We’re not taking anything off the table. We’re keeping our options open” in terms of energy legislation, said a spokesman for the Republican side of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Murkowski is working with Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) to bring an energy bill up for debate before Congress adjourns, he noted.

But considerable doubt lingers about whether any energy legislation — following the Sept. 11 attacks and amid the anthrax scares on Capitol Hill — will make it to the Senate floor this year. Even Senate Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) has conceded that these “events make it less likely that the Senate may get to a bill” this session, said a spokesman for the Democratic side of the committee.

As soon as Bingaman and his staff can return to the Hart Office Building, which still is closed due to anthrax contamination, the chairman said they will resume work on drafting a comprehensive energy bill to be forwarded to Daschle. He said he expects to send the measure to Daschle in about a week to 10 days after it’s completed.

It’s pretty safe to say that ANWR won’t be in Bingaman’s bill. Speaking to an Alliance to Save Energy energy summit last Thursday, he said ANWR was a “distraction from what needs to be done to boost domestic oil output in the next decade.” But a Bingaman initiative is likely to call for government financial incentives to help spur development and construction of a long-line natural gas pipeline from Alaska.

He believes an Alaska pipeline would be the “antidote” for what he sees as a “developing problem” — the nation’s growing dependence on foreign liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies. “We are about to make a major policy mistake of becoming, as a nation, dependent on imported natural gas brought in on tankers for a substantial part of our natural gas consumption,” he noted last week.

Bingaman believes an Alaskan line is stalled because of a “lack of certainty about the investment risk of building such a major pipeline” amid fluctuating gas prices. “Since natural gas prices vary from $2 to $10/Mcf, it is hard for the free market to take this challenge on by itself. This is the classic kind of market failure that requires assistance from the government in order to achieve the right national policy result,” he said.

Such a proposal is likely to be met with considerable resistance from senators who, while they strongly back an Alaskan line, are opposed to any kind of government subsidies for the project. They contend it would set a dangerous precedent.

Despite the disruption since Sept. 11, Bingaman noted that “we have been making quiet progress on a number of fronts in the Senate,” such as on electricity. “There is also developing consensus in a number of other areas. I am hoping that I can complete a package of proposals to serve as the starting point for debate in the Senate in the near future.”

Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham on Tuesday reaffirmed the Bush administration’s continued support for comprehensive energy legislation in the Senate.

“My preference, I think the president’s and the administration’s preference, is still to proceed with a comprehensive bill, as opposed to trying to somehow separate issues into stand-alone energy security issues and non-stand-alone energy security issues,” Abraham said during a press briefing sponsored by Energy Daily. “To me, these all are energy security issues at the end of the day — almost all of them.”

He believes Daschle’s decision to directly call energy legislation to the Senate floor, circumventing the Senate Energy Committee, has been a setback for the bill. “Prior to the decision that Sen. Daschle made to remove legislation from the committee process, I think we were making great progress in terms of resolving areas of disagreement.”

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