US Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar heard hours of Alaskans' views about exploration for oil and gas off their state's shores and came away promising a strategy to permit development while accounting for environmental risks. Salazar came to Alaska as part of four meetings in various US regions to collect public information on a five-year offshore leasing plan that he says was rushed in the last days of the Bush administration.

“I think everything is on the table. We are not prejudging the outcome of this process,” Salazar said.

That plan was issued in January 2009. It calls for aggressive offshore development in many regions formerly off-limits to drilling. The Bush plan called for nine lease sales off Alaska between 2010 and 2015. Sales would be held in the Chukchi Sea, Beaufort Sea, Cook Inlet and the North Aleutian Basin, which includes Bristol Bay.

“The people of Alaska care very passionately about this issue. There is not any single voice,” he said at the news conference. “Whatever we do, there are going to be some people who are disappointed.”

Salazar went to Dillingham, a Bristol Bay village where most residents oppose offshore drilling as too risky to the fish runs.

In Anchorage, Salazar heard from drilling supporters, as well as Governor Sarah Palin, who regularly used the pro-development slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill” in her unsuccessful vice presidential run last fall.

Palin advised that without extended offshore drillings, the trans-Alaska oil pipeline may close because of low flow. It currently carries only a third of the two million barrels per day it carried in 1988.

“Once the pipeline shuts down, it will mean the end of oil production from the North Slope,” she said.

Alaska’s outer continental shelf – federal waters normally situated three miles offshore – could grasp about 27 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 132 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, government estimates show.

Regardless of that hydrocarbon potential and a history of lease sales dating back to the 1970s, very little production or exploration has taken place in federal waters off Alaska. The only oil ever pumped from federal waters has been from a corner of BP’s Northstar field, an offshore unit in the Beaufort Sea that lies mostly on state leases close to shore. Only five wells have ever been explored in the vast Chukchi Sea.