We’ll start off with the obligatory caveats that it’s “too early to tell for sure,” that “nothing official has been released yet,” and that “all we have to go on right now are back-of-the-envelope estimates” – but gotta tell you: It sure as hell looks like Interior received more comments in favor of new, responsible energy exploration than ones opposed to it.

We don’t have a lot to go on in right now, but according to Consumer Energy Alliance, a Houston-based group that advocates an “all of the above” approach to securing our energy future, it sure looks like we have them beat. From CEA’s release:

More than 325,000 American people sent letters to Interior secretary Ken Salazar over the past six months urging his agency to expand responsible access to critical energy resources offshore, and Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA) helped deliver more than 150,000 of them. …

While the closure of this comment period marks a very early step in what is designed to be a long, deliberative process, the volume and intensity of public response on whether responsible offshore energy exploration should be part of our energy future suggests the status quo energy policies of the past will no longer be an option in the future. What we need now, and what these letters demand, is decisive action from this administration – not an effort to pocket veto these critical offshore energy resources.

Ok, so the good guys scored in excess of 325,000 – how about the other side? Turns out they’ve been working this one hard as well. This comes from Reuters:

The Alaska Wilderness League, along with about 20 other green groups, symbolically delivered comments to the department Monday from nearly 300,000 people opposing the proposed offshore leasing plan that would open much of the Arctic Ocean to drilling. … [The] group is pushing to halt all drilling in the Arctic Ocean until a comprehensive plan is developed to protect the area’s fragile ecosystems.

Earth to Alaska Wilderness League: Know this plan you spent millions of dollars to kill? The one you sent 300,000 letters in opposition to? Yes, well: It IS a comprehensive plan “to protect the area’s fragile ecosystems.” The five-year plan addresses lots more things than drilling, sweetheart. And maybe if you’d have read it, that would’ve become plain.

No need to cry over spilled rhetoric, we guess. Still, it’s worth noting that, despite all the press accounts out there suggesting that the greens ran up the score on the comment period, the reality of the situation appears to be this: They lost. We won. End of story. Hit the showers. And we won the previous comment period as well, fwiw – according to the Interior Department, opposition groups got crushed during the 2007-12 five-year plan process too. What was the carnage there? The final tally of four separate comment periods was 91,000 in favor, 32,000 opposed. That’s a 72 percent favorable rate.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the story was the same for the first comment period held for the 2010-2015 plan. Interior conducted that one from August to October 2008. And the tally was 86,000 in support of new exploration, and 79,000 opposed.

Less than two weeks from now (Sept. 21), the Interior Department will formally close the public comment period governing the development of our country’s new five-year energy plan – concluding what has been an unnecessarily contentious process from the get-go.

Fans of this site will remember that, on February 10, 2009, Secretary Salazar announced he was extending this comment period by an additional 180 days, ostensibly for the purpose of holding a series of field hearings at which the American people could make their views known on the dimensions of the plan.

At least that’s what his press release said. In reality, it’s widely accepted that the real reason for kicking the can down the road an extra six months was to ice out proponents of responsible offshore exploration, and just as important, give opponents extra time to rally their forces and ultimately win the comment period. Win the comment period, from his perspective, and he’d have all the justification he needs to toss out the Draft Proposed Plan and start again from scratch – with the new version of the plan essentially codifying the existing de facto ban on accessing America’s offshore resource base.

Whether or not the outcome of the comment period has been predetermined, time will certainly tell. But Alaska governor Sean Parnell isn’t about to sit idly by and let the process proceed without registering his state’s views on the imperative of Alaskan OCS energy development.

In a letter sent to Salazar last week, Parnell lays out in clear detail what Interior has on its hands in the federal portion of Alaska’s offshore waters, noting also how this energy can complement the president’s plan to promote an “all of the above” vision for America’s energy future:

A comprehensive energy future must include oil and gas, in addition to conservation and greater reliance on renewable sources. Alaska accounts for a significant percentage of the nation’s technically recoverable oil and gas resources, including an estimated potential of 27 billion barrels of oil and 130 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Alaska OCS alone.

But the Parnell letter is more than a simple laundry list of the number of jobs, units of energy and measure of energy security that can be obtained through the safe exploration of Alaskan resources. He also takes great care to explain to the secretary the relationship between the development of these energy reserves and the continued well being of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), a conduit through which more than 15 billion barrels of secure American energy has made its way to the U.S. mainland.

At its peak in 1988, the 800-mile pipeline transported 2.1 million barrels of oil a day, or approximately 24 percent of the nation’s crude oil production. In February 2009, the pipeline carried on average 14 percent of the nation’s crude oil production, and throughput is now 680,000 barrels per day and falling at an average of 4.95 percent per year.

We are quickly approaching the minimum throughput rate, beyond which the flow of oil cannot be maintained. Without development of new sources of Alaskan oil, TAPS could shut down within the next decade. New sources of oil must be discovered now in order to realize production in time to sustain TAPS operations and provide oil to the nation beyond the immediate future.

Here’s an element of the debate that heretofore has been lost among policymakers from the Outside. Plainly put, the pipeline was not designed to send a trickle of energy down the pike – it was designed to send millions of barrels a day. Dip below a certain minimum rate, and the thing just won’t work – a function of simple (it’s actually not so simple) physics and liquid dynamics.

So, OK: The pipeline currently sends down around 680,000 barrels of oil a day. How much lower can it afford to go? The state of Alaska tells us:

Recent studies projecting when the TAPS pipeline might shut down have variously estimated that the minimum technically feasible sustainable TAPS throughput … is in the range of 0.2 to 0.6 million [barrels a day].

Catch all that? Drop below 600,000 barrels a day, and all of a sudden, you find yourself in serious danger of rendering the thing inoperable. Render it inoperable, and the laws on the books say it needs to be torn down. Tear it down, and you no longer have a means of utilizing the vast majority of Alaska’s energy. And that’s an eventuality that seems to suit opponents of responsible energy development just fine.

Starting to understand the implications of this previously obscure comment period? In a very real sense, the future of our pipeline – and the American economy at large – depends on it. Kudos to Gov. Parnell for seeing the big picture here. And shame on us if we remain silent on this new five-year plan in the 12 days we have left before the comment period closes. Click here to participate.

A column that ran earlier this week in the Washington Times — authored by Alaska’s longtime (and sole) representative in the U.S. House, Don Young – explores the recent back-and-forth on cap-and-trade between former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). It’s a good read. But the piece also harkens back to some of the important lessons that Alaskans (and everyone else, for that matter) learned during the deliberation over the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System (TAPS) – at its time, the single largest construction project North American had ever seen.

Here’s what Rep. Young had to say about the connection between the TAPS debate of yore and the national energy dialogue in which we’re presently engaged:

American energy marvels such as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) are the real drivers of the American economy. TAPS didn’t require a government mandate; it required the federal government to get out of the way. This pipeline would never be built today. TAPS was successful only because of the oil embargo and, more significantly, because the legislation curtailed the ability of environmentalists to file lawsuits to block the project — an effort in which, unfortunately, they have become well versed. …

This summer, as TAPS prepares to send its 16 billionth barrel to the consumer, I am reminded that Sarah Palin is correct and Mr. Kerry and Mrs. Boxer are again on the wrong side of energy issues.

That got us to thinking about some of the statements made on Capitol Hill during those touch-and-go debates on whether to authorize the pipeline – a structure that, as Mr. Young mentioned, has delivered the lower 48 more than 15 billion barrels of American oil over its 30+ years of service.

For instance: Most folks don’t know that Vice President Joe Biden, the former senior senator from Delaware, was very much in the thick of the discussion back in 1973 when the Senate was deciding on how to proceed.

New to the Senate back then, at the ripe old age of 30, Biden nonetheless took on a leadership role in trying to strangle the pipeline in the cradle – not only voting NO on the famous Spiro Agnew-tie-breaking vote of July 17 (which streamlined the NEPA process, and allowed the construction to proceed), but then voting NO again the next day on final passage of the authorization, a proposal that carried the support of 77 of his colleagues.

Of course, the debate didn’t end there. The authorization was sent to the House, where changes were made, and eventually made its way back to the Senate in the form of a conference report. There again, as liberal Democrats joined conservative Republicans in support of TAPS, Sen. Biden refused to support it. The final vote on TAPS was recorded in November 12, 1973. Biden found himself on the wrong end of an 80-5 vote. Even Walter Mondale ended up voting for final passage, insisting upon his colleagues that “however great differences may be regarding the particular means in transporting these resources, virtually everyone agrees we need this oil.”

Not everyone, apparently. Worth remembering as Congress continues to drag its feet on a plan that would guarantee the future viability of the pipeline by making available billions of additional barrels of oil in Alaska’s Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.