The Senate Energy Committee approved a budget measure Wednesday that would open the refuge to oil drilling and raise $2.4 billion for the national treasury before 2011.

The 13-9 vote brought smiles to a row of Barrow residents and drilling proponents who came to watch the committee proceedings.

"I'm optimistic," said Tara Sweeney, Washington lobbyist for the Arctic Slope Regional Corp., an Alaska Native regional corporation that owns some of the oil rights within the refuge borders.

What to do with ANWR's coastal plain has been one of the nation's top natural resource debates for decades, and typically an emotional one. Development advocates, including Alaska's political leadership, have said the nation needs the oil -- an estimated 1 million barrels a day at peak production -- and it can be extracted safely. Conservationists argue drilling would irrevocably damage a pristine wilderness for too little oil to make a difference at the pump.

Very little of that debate played out Wednesday. Instead, the focus was procedure.

This time ANWR's fate is riding with something called the budget reconciliation bill, which is expected to be on the Senate floor as early as next week.

Unlike normal bills, budget reconciliation bills are immune from filibuster -- the procedural tool drilling opponents have used for years to block drilling in the refuge.

It takes 60 Senate votes to break a filibuster. Drilling supporters haven't been able to muster that many, but a vote this spring showed they had a simple majority. And that's all they need to pass a budget reconciliation bill.

Why ANWR is bound up in the Senate's obscure budget process is hard for the public to understand, said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., one of the nine anti-drilling votes.

"The best way to describe what we're doing today is it's kind of like hot-wiring a car," he said. When you don't have the keys -- or the 60 votes -- you try to circumvent the normal process with a special method, according to his analogy.

But the committee chairman, Pete Domenici, R-N.M., defended the tactic. Most people think that a majority is all it takes to pass a bill, he said.

"The problem is ANWR is resisted so violently that a vote of that type is not permitted. So that means a huge national resource is eliminated unless you have 60 votes to pass it," he said. "We're not trying to get around the majority. We're just trying to prevent the requirement that it be 60."

He wrote the ANWR section as stripped-down legislation, free of many of the environmental conditions and limitations that have been in many previous ANWR bills. The goal, he said, was to make sure it remained a revenue-raising measure because Democrats are likely to challenge its relevance to the budget.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said that in the hurry to produce revenues within the five-year budget cycle, the bill circumvents important safeguards.

"As I read this again, there are no minimum royalty rates, there are no enforcement provisions, there are no required inspections and no limits on the size or duration of leases, no requirement that operation plans be approved," he said.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said she has introduced a separate bill listing environmental safeguards, but she didn't want to clutter the reconciliation bill with items that didn't have to do with the budget.

She and Domenici successfully repelled several Democratic amendments Wednesday.

One of them, by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., dealt with the touchy issue of how much oil revenue the state of Alaska would get.

The bill says ANWR revenue would be split 50-50 between the state and the U.S. government. Trouble is, when Alaska became a state, Congress said Alaska was entitled to 90 percent of the mineral revenue from federal lands, and many Alaskans have insisted on the 90 percent.

Cantwell's amendment said that if Alaska filed a lawsuit to get a 90-10 split, drilling would be delayed until the court decided the case. American taxpayers should know in advance whether their share of the lease revenues is going to be $2.4 billion or only $480 million, she said.

Murkowski said she has strong feelings for the Statehood Act, but she and other Alaska leaders have learned to be pragmatic.

"Right now we have 90 percent of nothing, and if we are unable to pass this legislation we will continue to have 90 percent of nothing," she said.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat who favors ANWR drilling only if the revenues are split 50-50, held up what she said was a recent New York Times article quoting Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska.

The article says Stevens told reporters in Alaska that drilling should move ahead on the promise of the 50-50 split, but "once the state actually receives less than 90 percent -- then we can sue."

The article was actually from 1995. That year Congress did pass ANWR as part of a budget bill, but then-President Clinton vetoed it. President Bush, on the other hand, has made ANWR a priority.

Environmentalists watching Wednesday's vote did not sound confident of their next move. Brian Moore, legislative director of the Alaska Wilderness League, groused that Republicans were even admitting they drafted their bill to get around the filibuster.

"It's hard to call them cheaters when they say they're cheaters, so that's already an option out the window, right?" he said. "I think we have to figure out exactly what's going on and go back home and think about a few things."

Pete Rafle, of The Wilderness Society, said the ANWR bill is not a sure bet. For one thing, it will likely be part of a package that will include $35 billion in cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, student loans and other popular programs, as well as tax cuts.

Some analysts said the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the images of so many poor people imperiled and newly homeless would lessen Congress' appetite for cutting social service programs, sidelining the budget reconciliation bill and ANWR with it.

But the hurricane has also galvanized budget hawks in the House, who have demanded even greater cuts to offset the enormous costs of rebuilding the storm-wrecked region. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., has been pressing to raise the goal from $35 billion in budget cuts to $50 billion. He doesn't seem to have the votes in the House yet, and Senate support for such an ambitious cut is even less likely, but work on the budget bill goes on, and it appears ANWR has won its place in it.

Reporter Liz Ruskin can be reached at lruskin@adn.com.

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