Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski thinks Congress will have more success taking a "graduated" approach to energy legislation while keeping up the pressure to respond to last year's Gulf of Mexico spill.

At the time, "the explosion, the deaths, just the real tragedy that went on with that, the nation was fixated on what was happening in the Gulf of Mexico as we watched on our TVs, as we read about the efforts to plug that hole," Murkowski said. "And then they find success and they plug the well and the cleanup continues, and no longer is this incident in the news. And then, it seems like the pressure is off of us here in the Congress to act legislatively.

"We shouldn't allow the timing and the circumstances of what has happened down there to remove us from the responsibility of addressing the reforms that need to be made," she added.

Last year's failure of Congress to produce a spill-response bill showed "even if we were successful in building a bipartisan product, there's no guarantee that it then becomes a priority," she said, adding that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should make it a priority as well. "It needs to be made a priority by the administration, to say we need to have these structural reforms."

The Interior Department has started separating safety and environmental oversight from approval of offshore drilling leases and collection of royalty relief.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar "has done some things internally. But quite honestly, a lot of the fixes require a legislative fix," Murkowski said.

One of those is largely out of the hands of Murkowski and the Senate energy panel.

Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) are trying to find a compromise to raising the two-decade-old $75 million-per-spill liability cap for companies.

Landrieu and Begich are meeting first to develop an idea that would need to pass muster with those like Menendez, who is one of the leading offshore drilling critics. "We've told our staffs to get back at it," Begich told POLITICO. He met briefly with Landrieu to talk about it. "We both feel it's time to re-engage."

Murkowski said that's going to have to happen.

"One of the things that held us up ... was what happens with the liability issue and the cap," she said. "And so, maybe what you do [is] take people like Bob Menendez, who was leading on that issue, [Sen.] Frank Lautenberg [D-N.J.], and team them up with Mary Landrieu, myself, some of the others to make sure the commitment to fixing the systems is made while at the same time we can address the liability issue."

Meanwhile, Murkowski and Bingaman are also working on President Barack Obama's "clean energy standard," which promotes renewable power, nuclear sources and cleaner use of coal. She and Bingaman last month solicited public input on what a standard should entail. Responses are due Monday.

"There are those who suggested that a clean energy standard, in fact, may be nothing more than, you know, cap and trade under a different name," Murkowski said. "I don't think that that is the case, but if that is the case, then CES is not going to happen if that's how it is viewed. So ... we're looking to see just what is the temperature out there for an approach that would mandate a clean standard."