U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, today welcomed inclusion in the year-end spending bill of language she has long championed to repeal the decades-long ban on crude oil exports.

“Allowing oil exports is an important step forward in ensuring that our energy policies reflect our nation’s renewed abundance of resources. Not only will oil exports help safeguard our long-term economic prosperity, but it will also spur job creation across the country and deliver much-needed revenue to state and local governments,” Murkowski said. “With the threat of terrorism growing daily, oil exports are needed now more than ever to reduce volatility and provide our allies, and the world, a stable and secure source of energy.”

Today’s action by Congress to allow oil exports is a culmination of Murkowski’s work on this important geopolitical and national security issue.

Murkowski, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, first proposed lifting the 40-year-old ban on oil exports in a speech at the Brookings Institution in January 2014. She continued to build a solid case for modernizing U.S. energy trade policies with a series of white papers, speeches and calls for government and independent analysis. In July, the energy panel favorably reported out Murkowski’s Offshore Production and Energizing National Security Act (S. 2011), including language to fully repeal the outdated restrictions on exporting American oil.

“We have an opportunity to modernize our energy export policy and make America a world leader on issues of trade, the environment, and energy production, but we must seize it,” Murkowski said. “If we fail to act, we risk losing the gains in economic activity and job creation that we’ve seen in recent years in the energy sector.”

The bipartisan agreement announced early Wednesday morning as part of a 2016 budget deal would repeal all restrictions on the export of U.S. crude oil under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, including requirements on producers in Alaska to obtain a presidential national interest finding before shipping oil abroad. Limited export of oil from the trans-Alaska pipeline has been allowed, with presidential approval, since 1996.