How Murkowski helped move Biden on Willow

For nearly two years, Sen. Lisa Murkowski played the long game on expanding drilling in Alaska: She voted for many of President Joe Biden’s key nominees. She backed several of the Democratic president’s legislative priorities. And all the while, she bent the ears of top White House officials every chance she could.

All that work has paid off — in a big way.

On Monday, the Interior Department, at Biden’s direction, announced it would move forward with a scaled-back, but still expansive, plan for energy extraction in the Alaska Republican’s home state.

The massive ConocoPhillips endeavor, called the Willow project, will at its peak produce 180,000 barrels of oil a day across 68,000 acres inside the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Advocates say it will be an economic game changer for the state and even the nation, while environmentalists called it Biden’s single biggest climate betrayal since taking office.

Murkowski can take much of the credit for the result. In an interview with POLITICO’s E&E News on Monday afternoon, the Republican said she didn’t think it was “any great secret” that Biden was influenced, in part, by politics, as he weighed the inevitable backlash from green activists and fellow Democrats versus voters’ worries about rising energy costs and reliance on foreign oil.