At 4:30 PM, Washington DC time Thursday, outgoing Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar and others, held a press conference to announce the release of their expedited 60-day review of Shell’s 2012 Alaska Arctic drilling operations, which were plagued by a series of fiascos.

Both Rick Steiner and I will be making efforts this coming week to encourage Alaska Democrats to get Sen. Begich to open a U.S. Senate investigation or hearings on this gigantic set of troubling, unanswered questions.

Shell claimed at the start of the aborted 2012 drill season to have spent about $4.5 billion on its Alaska Arctic offshore drilling project. This season was quite expensive too, perhaps costing over a billion dollars before this catastrophe. Cleaning up its mess is going to be very expensive. And fighting renewed efforts to keep Shell out of Alaska waters may cost more scores of millions.