Anchorage Daily Planet by Tom Brennen (NGP Photo) Throughput in the trans-Alaska pipeline has been going down ever since that fateful day when I unwittingly announced that the North Slope oilfields had peaked out.  I’m hoping the Legislature will soon reduce oil taxes and get the industry exploring again to flatten the production curve and keep the oil flowing. Otherwise I’m afraid somebody will blame it on me.* * * Shell Oil’s announcement that it won’t be drilling in the Beaufort Sea this year was no surprise — they just ran out of time. It’s frustrating since the problem is being caused by government stalling, motivated by environmentalist agitation. Keep your fingers crossed for next year.  That was just one option for getting new oil into the pipeline. The other is new exploration and production likely to come from reducing oil taxes. If companies get to keep some of what they earn, they are quite likely to invest here. There is still more oil to be found.  The situation is not helped by state officials who are delighted by relatively high employment in the North Slope fields. Somebody needs to tell the bureaucrats that late-stage field operations are necessarily labor-intensive. More wells need to be drilled, more closely together, to keep the oil flowing. That and related operations provide quite a few jobs for a time, though not as many as when the fields were booming.  Citing the size of the Slope work force when no exploration is going on because of high taxes is like being tickled because the local cemetery is having to expand.

Calgary Herald by Dina O’Meara.  Law makers in Alaska called on TransCanada Corp. to fish or have their state-sponsored bait cut, introducing a bill Friday to abandon backing the massive project unless the company proves it has firm shipper commitments.