Two senior Democrats said that rounding out his energy and environmental policy team announced at a Chicago news conference, President Barack Obama will nominate Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado as his Interior Secretary - a key member of his energy team who would oversee the leasing of federal lands for oil and gas drilling.

The Interior Department oversees national parks and other large swaths of public lands, and sets policy for oil and gas drilling, mining and other resource extraction.

Salazar, an attorney with expertise in water law, is from the western part of the country, where most Interior secretaries come from. The son of Americans of Mexican descent, he led Colorado's Department of Natural Resources, and served as the state's attorney general before winning a vacant Senate seat in 2004. He entered Congress in the same freshman class as Obama.

The senator campaigned vigorously for Obama in Colorado, a swing state, barnstorming rural areas in a recreational vehicle while preaching alternative-energy development and its potential to revitalize rural economies. After Obama won the election, Salazar publicly urged him to build his planned economic stimulus package around investments in energy infrastructure.

Earlier this year, Salazar criticized the Interior Department for opening up his state's Roan Plateau to drilling. He said the regulations to begin opening land for oil shale development would "sell Colorado short."

The Senate's confirmation of Salazar would probably put the brakes on several controversial decisions on energy development by the Interior Department.