The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“ENERGY POLICY” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H4304-H4311 on May 20, 2008.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
ENERGY POLICY
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Boyda of Kansas). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I thank you for recognizing me to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives.
As a means of transition, and in fact it is not normal practice, but I would ask the gentleman from Texas if he might still be available to perhaps enter into a colloquy. If the gentleman from Texas would be interested in entering into a colloquy, I would be happy to ask him if he would yield for a question. I have been interested in listening to the presentations by the folks here, and I would ask if the gentleman from Texas would be willing to enter into a short colloquy just as a matter of clarification on our energy position?
Mr. LAMPSON. I absolutely would.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you. And I know you have been here on the floor talking about energy for the last hour. Just as a matter of transition, I would just ask a few clarifying questions.
The first one is, as I heard discussion about the Outer Continental Shelf, is there a nuance there? Are you for or against drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf for more energy?
Mr. LAMPSON. I personally am not opposed to drilling. I think that drilling is only one of many solutions to our problem. What I am trying to concentrate on is a whole host of research projects that have already been passed by the Congress.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time then, drilling the Outer Continental Shelf is part of the solution. We would agree on that?
Mr. LAMPSON. I would say that everything we can think of is a part of the solution. We shouldn't take anything off of the table. We are in an energy crisis and we must be considering every opportunity that we possibly have facing us.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I appreciate that response from the gentleman from Texas. So as we go down through this list of things that we might do, drilling the Outer Continental Shelf would be on the table. Drilling ANWR is on the table?
Mr. LAMPSON. I say everything needs to be on the table for discussion, yes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Let me just if I could then thank the gentleman and go through a list of things that I think that we should engage expand the supply of energy. Drill the Outer Continental Shelf, gas and oil. Drill ANWR. Open up nuclear. Drill non-national park public lands. Expand ethanol, biodiesel, solar, wind, clean burning coal. And then out of this whole piece of the energy pie, then add another slice to that, which I presume you have talked about tonight, and that would be the slice called conservation.
Would that be the picture you are looking at that I think I heard as I listened to your presentation tonight?
Mr. LAMPSON. Most of what you just mentioned is in this legislation.
Mr. KING of Iowa. So for those reasons I asked for those clarifications, that helps me in my transition as I go into the presentation that I hope to make tonight on energy. I just want to make those clarifications, because it does provide for a transition for us, and it also identifies some common ground that we have.
I would state to the gentleman from Texas that my view is that the free market does prevail and that more Btus of energy on the market will help to hold down the increase in prices, and, if all goes well, to actually reduce those prices of energy. That is the approach that we should be able to arrive at in a bipartisan fashion. If the gentleman would agree?
Mr. LAMPSON. Absolutely. If the gentleman would yield, that is precisely what I have been working on since November to get Members to join us with on this. We have taken any number of suggestions to change this legislation to accommodate different Members and different Members' thoughts about how we go about making this bipartisan, and the successful way to greatly expand the diversity of what we are using for energy this country.
Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Would the gentleman yield for just a moment?
Mr. KING of Iowa. I would yield to the gentlewoman from Texas.
Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. As I indicated on the floor, I am an oil and gas lawyer and obviously have a broadened perspective. But I would like to just say that I hope that even as you are presenting your presentation, that you heard what I said, which is I think that the energy leaders of the respective multinational companies that are in the United States need to sit down with all of us and refine an energy policy.
I will just limit my remarks, since I was on the floor, and just say that my support of the Outer Continental Shelf is in this way: Limited to the areas that the constituencies have been used to it, have seen it work environmentally, and that would be, in my perspective, and I have done work on that and legislation on that, the Gulf of Texas and Louisiana.
I think if you have a model and show how it works, you may be able to bring your other colleagues on. Because I want you to note, and I think you would note, that the opposition to the Outer Continental Shelf is bipartisan on the coast, bipartisan a lot on the coast of California, both Democrats and Republican opposition; in Florida it is Democrats and Republicans; and I assume up the coast of New York.
So I think maybe we can be used as a model. Those of us from Texas, and you are not, you are from way up Midwest, but from those of us from Texas and Louisiana, we have seen it. The point I made is even after Hurricane Katrina, we saw the survival of an environmentally safe water system where those rigs did not fall because we have understood the construction and we also understand the environment.
I would yield back, but I just wanted to say I think we have to educate, and I am ready to show how it works in the Gulf. And that is where I limit my support of the Outer Continental Shelf, where it has been done, where it can be proven it can be done right.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas and the gentlewoman from Texas. I know it is a little bit irregular to engage the people that have just completed a special order, but I think it is important for us to engage across the aisle.
I will transition to the things I came here to say, but I will be looking at the proposals that you have made here tonight and the language that you have. And I have been relatively aggressive on this energy issue, and I think we need to be very aggressive on this energy.
In fact, as we look across the spectrum of all of the components of energy, I wouldn't make anything off limits. I want to drill the entire Outer Continental Shelf, and I know of no natural gas spill that has affected the environment in a negative way. In fact, I don't know an Outer Continental Shelf oil drill that has affected the environment in any lasting negative way.
We did see a lot of stability in the Katrina hurricane and the subsequent hurricane that came after that. There was one oil platform that was broken loose in the Gulf, and it was pushed 60 miles and came upshore down by Mobile, Alabama. However, there wasn't a significant spill. We can do this.
Mr. LAMPSON. If the gentleman would yield for just a very short quick 30 second story or point to make, off of the coast of Florida we are saying that we should not be drilling. But let's look at the other way around. We won't get permission to drill within 200 miles of the Florida coast or any of the coast in the United States. However, Cuba is drilling within 45 miles of Florida's coast. So there is another country that is drilling within our boundaries that we are prohibiting our own people from being able to drill in. It does not make sense.
Clearly we have plenty of work to do, and I think it is wonderful if we have the opportunity to work across this magic aisles of ours and get it done for the American people.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I appreciate the gentleman's remarks from Texas. I believe also that, at the very minimum, we ought to go out there and tack some wells in right up against those Chinese Cuban wells that are going in within 45 miles of Key West. I am all for that. And let's at least build a little barrier and get our share of that well and start pipelining it back in here if we can. I would be significantly aggressive on all of this.
I would say on the upside too, Madam Speaker, and to the American people, there are a couple of good things going on in America. One is that we have the structure put together where we can produce the first refinery since 1975. There will be a vote that comes up, it will be primary night, June 3rd, and if the people in Union County, South Dakota, decide they want to have a refinery in their Hyperion refinery, then very likely that will be the biggest roadblock for a large refinery to come in that would deal with the pipeline coming down from I call it the tar sands in Northern Alberta, a tremendously large oil supply up there. A pipeline would come down, and the crude oil would be refined there and then distributed across the area in a network of pipelines. That is something that we will find out here in a few weeks, if that is going to happen.
Another thing that America doesn't seem to know is that there is a nuclear plant that is being constructed--thanks again to the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Lampson--there is a nuclear plant that is being constructed in South Carolina. I am not certain when that goes on line, Madam Speaker. But those are two large milestones that are being driven by the market and by the need.
It is not being driven by this Congress. It is not being driven by this Congress, because this Congress has not taken any action to open up opportunities for refineries or open up opportunities for nuclear power plants or any other kind of power plant to be built.
This is happening because market forces are driving them, and the regulatory resistance is being overcome by very high energy prices. It is not because Congress reduced the regulations. It is not because Congress provided incentives. It is because the costs of energy are so overpowering that it is now starting to roll over the top of the prohibitory regulations that have been put in by this Congress and signed by more than one President.
So, the overall picture, Madam Speaker, is this: This is what I call the energy pie. It is a pie chart, and this is energy consumption 2007: 101.6 quadrillion Btus. Now, I could explain what all that is. That is a lot of Btus. It is important to look at it proportionately. Let's just say that is 100 percent of the energy consumption by British Thermal Unit in the United States.
This pie chart represents the percentages of their consumption that comes from each of these sources of energy. Natural gas, 23.3 percent of our energy consumption in the United States is natural gas. We use that for heating energy and for production energy and a lot of other ways. Natural gas is clean burning and it is environmentally fairly friendly. Also the coal is 22.4 percent. So coal and natural gas comprise about equal amounts, very equivalent amounts of energy consumption in the United States.
Then we go to nuclear. It is larger than most people will think. Even though we haven't built a nuclear plant since 1975, 8.29 percent of our energy consumption in the United States is produced by nuclear. That is a piece that in France, for example, their electrical generation is produced by nuclear. 78 percent of their megawatts of electricity are produced by nuclear. If the French can do that and do that without incident, do that without fear, do that without concern, we can produce a lot more energy by nuclear here in the United States. Now, that is environmentally friendly. It is clean burning. It is the safest form of electrical energy that we have, and we have been remiss in not continuing to develop our engineering capability to produce nuclear.
That slice of the energy pie could get a lot larger. It could take up some of this going to coal, it could take up some of this going to natural gas, because there is electrical production generation in each of these, natural gas and coal, and actually a lot of it, and the nuclear could be a bigger piece of this pie.
As we go around the chart, the hydroelectric is 2.4 percent. That is probably not going to get any bigger. That requires we build more dams. There are a lot of regulators in the way that don't want to see that happen.
As we go around the chart, you can see small pieces, geothermal, wind, solar, all less than 1 percent of the energy consumption. Fueled by ethanol is almost 1 percent is all. We would think that would be a lot more, Madam Speaker. 1 percent, but a growing number. Biodiesel is a tiny .06 percent of the energy there. Biodiesel is a fledgling part right now, and it may well become significant. Today it is a small piece. Wooden waste is bigger than we would think.
Then we get to gas, 16.9 percent, and diesel and heating oil, et cetera, is 8.84, and jet fuel, 3.31, and other petroleum projects, asphalt and heavy oils and those, 10 percent. That is the energy consumption. 101 quadrillion Btus of energy consumed in the United States.
Now, if we are going to look at how we address this energy situation, Madam Speaker, we need to look at it from the whole pie chart perspective. So often we are here debating on whether we should be drilling in ANWR or whether we should drill the Outer Continental Shelf or whether we ought to grow ethanol from corn or maybe grow ethanol from cellulosic, which is a big part of what is in the farm bill that maybe we will see again tomorrow.
What do we do with solar? There is plenty of solar power that cooks the United States, especially in the summertime and especially in the Southwest. Can we collect that and turn that into energy? Perhaps.
But as we have this debate, we can debate the relative merits of these sources of energy. But what I am not hearing the Members do or the leadership do or the American people or the business world in America, no one is out there pitching the big picture, pitching this picture that we had the conversation with Mr. Lampson, and that is the entire picture of energy, the holistic picture of energy, this energy pie. What is our solution? No one thing.
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No one thing is the solution. And there are some parts that need to be bigger on this pie chart and there are others that need to be a little smaller on this pie chart. But maybe, maybe our solution instead is let's make all of these pieces of pie a little bit bigger and let's produce more BTUs of energy out of every source that we can.
As that happens and as market forces dictate, we will see, I believe, fuel from ethanol get up above 1 percent. I think actually from a gasoline standpoint we can take it to 13, 14, or maybe even 15 percent of the energy that today is being consumed by vehicles that burn gasoline or that burn generally a 10 percent blend of ethanol. So maybe this 1 percent here of the overall can become as much as 15 percent of the gasoline component, say 15 percent of this, 16 or 17 percent of the BTUs which is in gasoline today. That is one of the ways that it might change in proportion.
And so then another way that we can look at this is if we can produce a little more biodiesel, we can take a bigger piece out of the diesel fuel on this side. If we can increase nuclear, as I mentioned, then we can take a bigger bite out of the electrical production. And if we can produce more electricity with nuclear, then the pressure comes on natural gas and comes on coal to give up a little bit of that market share to nuclear. When that happens, it puts the coal and the gas in different areas and different markets, and perhaps keeps the price from going up or maybe even can get us a little bit lower price on our energy.
I think this: If we are consuming 101.6 quadrillion BTUs of energy and we are producing--this is the chart behind here, this is the energy that we are actually producing here in the United States--71.7 quadrillion BTUs of energy.
And so, Madam Speaker, just roughly speaking, we are producing about 72 percent of the energy in the United States that we are consuming here in this country, 72 percent of the energy. The balance of it presumably is imported.
Now, we can import it from Canada, we can import it from Venezuela, we can import it from Saudi Arabia and the Middle East; in fact, we do that from all of those places. But when we do that, it does a number of things to us. It makes us vulnerable and dependent upon Middle Eastern oil, for example, and makes us also dependent on Venezuelan oil and energy, and it makes us dependent upon the Canadians. Which is the least of my concerns. I am very happy to be doing business with the Canadians. If we are going to be importing energy from the western hemisphere or anyplace on the planet, I think from the Canadians is as good a place as there is. And we do import some oil from Mexico as well.
But if we are only producing 72 percent of the energy that we are consuming, that means then that we, just by simple math, are importing 28 percent of the energy that we are consuming. And I believe that we are importing 61 percent of the oil and gas or the crude oil, the products that we are using here in the United States, 61 percent of that imported. And as you see, we are producing I think all or very close to all of our own coal, we are producing a percentage of our natural gas. Not all of it, because a fair amount of that is imported into the United States. If you look at the hydroelectric, we are producing all of that, the geothermal, all of that. There are a number that we are doing, wind, solar, ethanol, as it goes around the corner. We are producing most of that.
But these other energies, the ones that we are most dependent on, Middle Eastern oil, 61 percent of our crude oil products imported, much of that from the Middle East. We are very dependent upon it, and that needs to change, Madam Speaker.
So my policy is this. And I don't know, I haven't identified the distinctions between my approach and the gentleman from Texas who spoke in the previous hour. But my policy is this. Take this pie chart that we have, let's produce a lot more natural gas. Let's go offshore, drill the Outer Continental Shelf. Let's drill everywhere offshore in the United States. Let's first rush down there and set up our drill rigs right up against those Chinese drill rigs 45 miles from Key West and tack those wells in there and start pulling that oil out and work our way back. We will build a fence between us and them of oil wells right there on that line between Key West and Havana.
There is a lot of natural gas on the Outer Continental Shelf. And in that region from the gulf coast around Florida and back again, there are known reserves of at least 406 trillion--that is trillion with a T--cubic feet of natural gas that can be tapped offshore down that way. And there is a lot of gas in the gulf coast altogether.
We can produce a lot more natural gas. We can punch holes around the Outer Continental Shelf. We can do that offshore almost anywhere in the United States. There is natural gas almost everywhere offshore in the United States. But we need to expand that where we can develop the fields and be able to transport that gas effectively and efficiently. And the most promising region is offshore in the Outer Continental Shelf of Florida.
Now, I have a growing list of Florida Members of Congress who are willing to support drilling offshore in the Outer Continental Shelf, because they understand that this Nation is vulnerable to other countries for energy supply. And they are understanding more and more that if they are going to build generating plants in Florida, and they increasingly want to build them as natural gas fire generating plants, that they are going to have to go along with the idea of tapping into the resources that they have offshore in Florida itself.
So, they are concerned that people sitting on the beach might see an oil rig out there and not come back to the beach and sit down in the sunshine. Beautiful State, beautiful beaches. I don't think they are matched anywhere. But if you cannot see an oil well 200 miles offshore, you can't see a gas well 200 miles offshore.
To give an example, somebody in the Midwest that might think like me, if I am sitting down between Iowa and Missouri on the Missouri line, on the State line at say Lineville, for example, a little town right there on the Missouri line and Iowa, and I am sitting in my lawn chair gazing off to the north up to the Minnesota border, roughly 200 miles, maybe a little less, that is about what we are talking about. If we are worried about drilling offshore in Florida, 200 miles offshore in Florida, roughly the equivalent of sitting on the Iowa-Missouri border and wondering about whether you are going to have something mess up the scenery that is going to be a drill rig that would be up on the Minnesota border that far away and perhaps even a little further away, as I say, a growing number of the members of the Florida delegation willing to tap into this.
But truthfully, I say this to the good members of Florida, both Republicans and Democrats, those resources that are offshore are American resources, not Florida resources, not Alabama or Mississippi or Louisiana or Texas resources. These are American resources, the resources that were claimed by President Reagan on the Outer Continental Shelf out to that 200 mile limit, I think the year was 1983. It seems as though Jimmy Carter made a move in that direction, too, and I can't remember exactly what he did, but I believe President Reagan declared our influence and declared the mineral rights out to the 200 mile limit. It wasn't a declaration of the Governor of Florida or the Governor of any other State that is a coastal State. It was a declaration by the President of the United States that claimed those resources for all the people in the United States.
And so as much as I like to see coalitions and like to see us get along and cooperate with each other, Madam Speaker, I will submit that the good people in Florida and the rest of the way around the coast, really, let's bring them into the dialogue. But this is an American situation, not a Florida or a Louisiana or a Texas situation, and we need to make a decision for America. I am increasingly hearing the Florida delegation make such decisions and take such stands.
If push comes to shove, I am going to say that it is America that will decide; it needs to be this Congress that decides. We need a President that will help us decide to do that, drill the Outer Continental Shelf. If we do that, natural gas gets more plentiful, and the law of supply and demand keeps these gas prices from going up and in fact pushes them down. If we can put a lot more natural gas into the marketplace, that means Florida can have the electricity that it needs to run its air conditioners, and it means that they can have the natural gas that they need to generate their electricity, and that natural gas can be delivered to the rest of the country, heat our homes, run our generating plants that we need, too.
But, Madam Speaker, I would submit this. Let's put more natural gas into this marketplace. Let's put a lot more natural gas into the marketplace. But let's not turn a lot of it into electrical generation. Let's use this for the things we need it for. Let's use it for industrial production, plastics, for example. Mr. Peterson from Pennsylvania has given speech after speech on those necessities.
But let's also use the natural gas for fertilizer production, because that fertilizer is what is necessary in order to provide food for the American people and the people of the world. You simply can't produce food without nitrogen, the nitrogen that either is drawn from the air naturally through a crop or nitrogen that is put into the ground through the fertilizer. And 90 percent of the cost and of the feedstock that goes into the production of nitrogen fertilizer is natural gas itself. And so more natural gas available on the marketplace means that we will come back and rebuild the fertilizer production industry in the United States, and it frees up a lot more gas for the production of the things that we need as far as industrial production is concerned. Home heating is another way we can use natural gas.
And if we increase the production of the natural gas and we start taking away from the generation of electricity by natural gas and replace that with nuclear, you can start to see how the pieces of this pie will shift. American production can increase for natural gas, but actually the share of the overall consumption of energy could actually diminish even though we increased it because we will have more energy on the marketplace and more energy in the form of nuclear, which is here; the 11.73 percent of our production of energy is nuclear. But if we are down to the other chart, then it is 8.29 percent of our consumption is nuclear. That gives a sense of what we can do with this energy, grow the size of the energy pie.
Madam Speaker, this chart, this is energy consumption, 101.6 quadrillion BTUs of energy consumed in the United States, which tells us that about 28 quadrillion BTUs of energy is imported into the United States. So this energy pie that I just sat down here on the floor needs to be at least matched by the production energy pie chart here. And another thing that we can do is add another slice to this pie called energy conservation, so that on this consumption side we can replace some of that consumption of energy with the conservation of energy, efficient homes, efficient vehicles, and efficient generating plants, efficient plants of all kinds.
That is the view of the energy situation here in the United States, Madam Speaker.
And then I have another bar graph right here that helps lay out the proportionality of the different kinds of production that we have. I started on the bottom. For petroleum, it is 39.14 percent of our production. So we are dependent upon petroleum products significantly. It is almost 40 percent.
We go to natural gas. That is another well product, another petroleum hydrocarbon product, 23.25 percent of natural gas. These two things of course come out of the ground, deep wells, not quite of deep of wells as a rule. And coal. Coal has traditionally been a big part of our energy consumption here in the United States. And you see how, as we go to nuclear with 8.27 percent energy consumption, now it goes down 2.5 percent, hydroelectric about the same, ethanol less than 1 percent. And it gets down to where these other pieces, biodiesel, solar wind, geothermal and that are all tiny in comparison.
Another way to look at this is as we grow fuel by ethanol, that bar gets longer. Hydroelectric probably stays the same. And wind can get bigger, solar can get bigger, biodiesel can get bigger. But we are in the early stages of this, Madam Speaker. We have a lot to do, and we have a lot to do to expand each one of these kinds of energy that we have.
We are a Nation, we are a Nation that is sitting on a significant amount of natural gas. We actually have a wealth of natural gas. And I recall a statement made into the Congressional Record by a Member of Congress from Colorado about 3 or 4 years ago, and that is that we have enough natural gas in the United States underneath the non-national park public lands that if we would drill that natural gas in the known reserves, there is enough there to heat every home in America for the next 150 years, Madam Speaker, 150 years of heating every home in America just with the gas that is underneath the non-national park public lands, Bureau of Land Management lands, primarily.
And why can't we do that? Why can't we open up all those areas to drilling? We have do so in an environmentally friendly fashion; We have done so without spillage in a significant way without any kind of permanent environmental damage. And we need to open up our non-national park lands for drilling and for distribution. We can't be shutting people out of there by shutting off roads and not allowing them an ability to deliver the product. We have got to open this up and get the energy into the marketplace.
We do that, drill our non-national park public lands and we drill the outer continental shelf for gas and oil and we drill ANWR. And ANWR is the piece that I asked the gentleman from Texas about. I have long been an advocate for drilling in ANWR. I took a trip up there a few years ago because I had listened to the rhetoric about ANWR.
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And the constant statement was that this is a natural, beautiful arctic wilderness. It's a place that wildlife needs to be able to roam without being disturbed by man, pristine wilderness area.
And so I remember seeing commercials on television that showed a beautiful alpine forest, a beautiful alpine forest represented as Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And so I'm sitting there, like any American would be, thinking, boy, if we go up there and bulldoze those trees and start putting roads in and pipelines in and drilling into that beautiful alpine forest, it'll never be the same.
And I wasn't really totally shocked or surprised when I got up there, but I started to put all the pieces together. I was looking around for trees. And as we flew north, it was a long flight from where I saw the last tree out the window of the plane before we got to the place up there in ANWR where they want to drill. In fact, it's about 700 miles from the most northerly tree approaching the Arctic circle. It's about 700 miles south of the area they want to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and then in a region with that Eskimo town called Kaktovik. That's about 250 to 300 people that live up there right on the Arctic Ocean.
So as we flew over that area, we flew over the north slope of Alaska, which had the pipeline. The Alaska pipeline was built beginning in 1972. And the wells were drilled up there beginning about that same period of time. And so for all these years we've watched crude oil be pumped down out of the north slope of Alaska into that pipeline and down to the Port Valdez, where it's been loading tankers, and the tankers have then gone down to the refineries along the West Coast.
Madam Speaker, the question continues, and that is that comments continually come to my office about allegations that that crude oil from Alaska is being exported to places like Japan. And once again, I looked into that. Once again I got the answer back that says no, that oil is going to the United States. It goes down for United States production.
Early on there were some market forces that sent some of that oil across over to Japan. It has been a long, long time since any of that oil has gone anywhere except into the U.S. marketplace. So I think we can be confident that the oil that would come out of ANWR would also come into the U.S. marketplace. In fact, it would go into the same pipeline.
And as the oil wells in the north slope start to wind down and start to slow in their production, we need to ramp up production next door in ANWR to bring that oil on-line and keep that Alaska pipeline full. If we fail to do that, the line will corrode on the inside and, as it starts to, it'll take a fair amount of renovation work to get it back up to speed again if we don't keep it working most of the time.
And so, as I looked at the ANWR region, and flew over that 19.6 million acres, I was looking for caribou herds that would be scattered out all over the place, and perhaps a lot of musk oxen and birds and polar bears, et cetera.
But, Madam Speaker, as much as we flew over that area and looked, from end to end, out and back, as low as we could safely fly, all of us looking out the window, the pilot finally spotted four musk oxen, four oxen standing out there in 19.6 million acres. And I'm sure we missed some animals. We didn't see them all. They were standing there with their head down, doing nothing, just standing there, four of them all in a little group. And we saw that, and two big white birds. I don't know what kind they were. That's all we saw for wildlife across that whole region.
But what we know is this, that there is not a native caribou herd in ANWR, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It is a kind of a maternity ward where caribou migrate in from Canada in the spring, starting perhaps a week or 10 days into May, and they have their calves in there in that region around the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And once those calves get big enough, then they migrate back to Canada mid June or the latter part of June. That's the extent of the caribou herd.
Now, if we're worried about caribou, we ought to look and see what happened to the caribou herd on the north slope of Alaska where we have about, let's say, 36 years of experience up there building pipe lines, drilling oil wells and delivering oil onto the marketplace of the world.
And so the caribou herd that was 7,000 head of caribou back in 1970 today is over 28,000, and the herd is growing. That doesn't tell me that the work that's been done on the north slope has been detrimental at least to the caribou herd which is more than four times what it was back in 1970 when they first began the operations. Court injunction shut it down for 2 years, and then the work really began in 1972, as I recall.
But from 7,000 caribou to 28,000 caribou on the north slope, I don't think we ought to worry about the caribou, if that's our issue, and any kind of environmental reason that they might come up with on the other side of the aisle not to drill. So all the indications are that the caribou are going to do just fine with the pipeline running through them and some oil rigs that are drilling.
We think, somehow, that wildlife just simply is not compatible with man and not compatible with machines, not compatible with oil drilling or pipelines or road construction or populations. So Madam Speaker, I would submit that there are a number of examples that would beg otherwise, and that would be--
Well, one of those easy examples would be, let's see, I get my days right. Night before last, as my wife and I were walking down the street at about let me see, pretty close to Sixth and Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast, there a furry raccoon ran down the sidewalk on the other side of the street, almost in the heart of downtown Washington, D.C. And a raccoon figured out how to live inside Washington, D.C. It's the first one I've seen running around on the streets. I was quite surprised, but there he was.
Another example, Madam Speaker, would be, I recall my wife and I were doing a little road trip. We had driven up to the end of the road in northern Ontario. And there's a paved highway that goes up to a city by the name of Red Lake, Ontario, actually a fairly small town but along the shore of the lake there, a beautiful region. And it's vast and it's wild, and it's open wilderness.
But I'd always been concerned about how the eagle would adapt to humanity. And I recall working on a job in Southwest Iowa where the Department of Natural Resources, in a heavy timber, discovered one of the earliest eagle nests in modern times in the State of Iowa. And this would be back in, I believe, 1986. The game warden told me about the eagles nest, but would not tell me where it was because he said that if I would walk down there I would scare the eagle off the nest and the eagle would fly away and the eggs wouldn't hatch. That was the concern about scaring an eagle out of their reproduction operation. And that was things we heard many times, that these animals do not, and they're not very compatible with humanity.
Well, Madam Speaker, I don't know what happened to that eagle out in that heavy timber in Southwest Iowa. I presume she hatched out her eaglets and they flew away, because we've got a lot of eagles living in the country side now, these 22 years later.
But what I did see up there in Northern Ontario were the highway, a paved highway that actually has a reasonable amount of traffic going north and south. It's two lanes. But it's split around a high line pole, a big tall high line pole that was perhaps over 100 feet high. And as we drove by, we had the top down, and I looked up on top of that pole and there was an eagle nest with an eagle sitting in it, keeping an eye on all the traffic that was buzzing by right directly underneath its necessary.
Now, that tells me that animals are fairly compatible. All of them maybe are not. And the argument about the spotted owl, I don't have quite the personal experience rebuttal to that. But we do know that peregrine falcons live pretty well in the city if they can prey on the pigeons that also live pretty well in the city.
And so time after time we find out that animals adapt to their environment, and a lot in the same way that people do. They will find a way to find some feed and find some shelter and reproduce and hatch some little ones out. The caribou found out how to do that in the north slope.
There's not a problem in ANWR. No one can create an environmental scenario that tells me that we should go without energy in America.
But we do have the situation where the Secretary of the Interior has put the polar bear on the threatened species list. Now, this polar bear that has watched its population over the last 2 decades go from about 7,000, maybe as low as 5,000 polar bear, now up to about 25,000 polar bear. That would be the world population of polar bear. We've watched polar bear numbers that are blossoming, anywhere from 3\1/2\ to five times the population of polar bear that it was 20 years ago.
And yet, for the first time in the history of the country, the Secretary of the Interior has put an animal on the threatened species lists because of the predictions from the global warming enthusiasts of what will happen to its environment if they are right.
Now, Madam Speaker, I will submit that that polar bear will become the tool and the pawn and the toy of litigation after litigation after litigation that will be designed to shut down the development of energy exploration and production in all of those regions where the polar bear might roam or might have roamed. That's what we can expect coming, because this debate isn't really about the well-being of the polar bear.
This debate is about people on that side of the aisle, not all of them, but I do believe the majority of them, Madam Speaker, that really in their heart of hearts don't mind seeing expensive energy. They don't mind seeing $4 gas. In fact, I don't think they'd mind seeing 6, 8 or
$10 gas because they believe that the higher the cost of energy, the less of it we will use.
If gas goes to six bucks or 10 bucks, more people will park their car, more people will ride their bicycle, more people will walk, more people will take mass transit, and more people will stay home. If all of that happens, their calculus is that we'll use less energy per capita, instead of more energy per capita, and the net result will be that, in their mind, that they saved the planet from global warming.
Well, this is a long ways from subtle science, and we should not be handicapping the economy of the United States of America for the purposes of people who believe we should have a more expensive energy policy.
So in spite of what I heard the gentleman from Texas say, and I don't discount his word, nor do I challenge his integrity. I will submit that his party has only brought energy issues to this floor of Congress that have raised the cost of energy by making it more scarce.
They've tried to bring windfall profits taxes on the energy companies. They're the ones that are keeping our energy at least as low as it is today. They're slowing the increase in prices, companies like Exxon, for example, that are putting billions of gallons of gasoline out there in the marketplace.
If they stop producing because we punish them, gas is going to go up, not down. We don't get cheaper gas prices by punishing energy companies, and we don't get cheaper gas prices by taxing companies after the fact in windfall profit taxes, Madam Speaker, because what will happen is they'll sit around the boardroom and they'll decide, wait a minute. We paid our royalties to the Federal Government for the energy that was there. We entered into these agreements in good faith. We're an efficient company, an efficient company that drilled and explored the leases that they paid for, put that energy on the marketplace for a fair market price and paid the royalties to the Federal Government for that.
Now, how do we come in and change the deal?
How do we say, if you don't renegotiate those lease agreements with the Federal Government, we're not going to let you enter into another lease agreement. We're going to hold a gun to your head and make you capitulate and change. The deal's not a deal, according to some folks on this side of the aisle, and a lot of them are driving the agenda.
And so, Madam Speaker, I submit this, that a deal must be a deal. And we can't be penalizing energy companies that are out there exploring, risking billions of dollars in capital, and putting gas and diesel fuel and oil and kerosene and jet fuel and asphalt for our roads all out there on the marketplace, keeping the price as low as possible.
They're competing in this marketplace. And yes, they are making some money. But if their Board of Directors are listening, they're hearing what this Congress is saying to demonize the people that are producing the energy, and they're starting to wonder, shouldn't I take some of that billions in profit and invest that in some other industry someplace where Congress isn't going to come in and tax me after the fact?
If they play by the rules, every company that plays by the rules should be able to count on the Federal Government keeping their part of the bargain. And whatever the tax structure is when they enter into the agreement should be the tax structure that they comply with, at least for that year that they've entered into and the corporate tax and the royalties that are designed to be part of it.
I've spent my life in the business world, 28 years meeting payroll, doing construction work, entering into contracts, some written, many written actually, many more verbal contracts, sometimes a hand shake, sometimes we didn't bother, sometimes it was over the phone, sometimes it was just simply eye contact, nod, and we have the kind of relationship where we know we'll each keep our deal.
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I respect a contract. I respect a deal and an agreement. That's what makes the economic world go round. People that have integrity that understand that a deal is a deal are what keeps this world going. And we have verbal agreements that go on up into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and in the end, we're evaluating the character of the people that are entering into those.
I would also submit that one of my favorite energies here on this chart, the energy production, which is the fuel by ethanol, this .94 of a percent here, is getting a bit of a bad rap. And it's getting a bit of a bad rap by the folks who just simply don't like the competition of ethanol. I think it's become a political argument rather than a rational scientific argument.
I know a couple of scientists in this Congress who are working and tracking the three laws of thermodynamics, and I hope they're paying attention when I make this argument, Madam Speaker, and that is this: according to Argon Labs out of Chicago--first the argument that comes from ethanol's critics is it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get out of it. Madam Speaker, I submit that's factually incorrect.
If ethanol from corn can only be calculated if you take a bushel of corn and you say, All right, now I have this bushel of corn here sitting here at the ethanol plant, I want to convert it into ethanol. How much energy does it take to convert this bushel of corn into ethanol compared to how much energy do I get out of this bushel of corn? And if you're going to be fair about it, if we're comparing it to gasoline, we have to also measure how much energy it takes to refine the same amount of energy from crude oil into gasoline, because it takes energy to do that, too.
Here are the numbers, Madam Speaker. To produce one Btu of energy in the form of ethanol from corn, you will consume, according to Argon Labs, .67 Btu as the energy that it takes to get an entire Btu out of corn in the form of ethanol from shell corn sitting at the gates of the ethanol plant. That's the equation.
But if you go down to the oil refinery, let's just say in Texas, and you have a barrel of crude oil sitting at the gates of the oil refinery of Texas, how much energy does it take to get a Btu, a British thermal unit of energy in the form of gasoline out of that crude oil? That, Madam Speaker, is 1.3 Btu's; .67 to get one out of corn ethanol, 1.3 Btu's to get one out of gasoline refined from crude oil. Almost twice as much energy to craft gas out of crude as it is to convert corn into ethanol, Btu to Btu.
Another way to look at that is a gallon of gasoline is, for round purposes, is 100,000 Btu's of energy. Let's just say it takes a little bit more of a gallon in the form of ethanol, but let's say we had two jugs sitting here, one has ethanol in it and one has gasoline in it, each are 100,000 Btu's. Well, to produce 100,000 Btu's of ethanol it took 67,000 Btu's of energy to convert corn into ethanol. 67,000 Btu's to get 100,000. And to convert crude oil into 100,000 Btu's, roughly a gallon of gasoline, it takes 130,000 Btu's to get your 100,000, roughly a gallon's worth.
So there's your answer, about twice as much energy to convert gas from crude oil as it is to convert corn into ethanol.
Those are laboratory scientific facts, Madam Speaker, and those are facts that ethanol's critics cannot get around. And so let me take us to another level.
Since it doesn't take more energy than you get out of it, .67 Btu's to get one full Btu of energy out of corn, since it doesn't take more energy, it does for gasoline, it doesn't for ethanol, then the only other argument that remains is well, food versus fuel, Madam Speaker.
And the argument that we're using this corn for fuel instead of feeding the world population, well, we have a lot of folks who think we take field corn and, I suppose, set it on our plates and cook it up and feed it. Now, that may well be how we make grits. I don't know that. We don't make any grits in Iowa, but I do have a little sack on my shelf. And other than that, our corn goes to about some 300 products, maybe a little bit more than that. Corn sweetener and a whole variety of products including, I think, the forks, knives, and spoons at the Longworth cafeteria are today now made from corn.
But we produced 13.1 billion bushels of corn last year in the United States. Now, that's the annual crop for the 2007 crop, 13.1 billion bushels of corn. Now, if we're going to argue that food prices went up, I'm going to take that argument away also from ethanol's critics, and here's how it is. We produce 13.1 billion bushels of corn. We exported more corn than ever before. We exported 2.5 billion bushels of corn. And so more corn exported than ever before, and you subtract that 2\1/
2\ billion from the overall crop of 13.1, you end up with 10.6 billion bushels of corn left over after we exported more than ever before.
Then we converted 3.2 billion bushels of corn into ethanol, roughly 9 billion gallons of ethanol, 3.2 billion.
So remember, we were at 13.1 billion bushels, overall production, minus 2\1/2\ billion bushels for export, leaves us 10.6 billion. Then from that we subtract 3.2 billion that went to ethanol. That takes us down to 7.4 billion bushels of corn left over for domestic consumption.
Now, that happens to be the exact number that is the average of our corn that's available for domestic consumption for all of the other years of this decade is 7.4 billion bushels of corn.
So one would say by this argument we didn't really take any corn out of the availability for food for domestic consumption in the United States because we still have 7.4 billion bushels left over after we exported 2\1/2\ billion bushels after we converted 3.1 billion bushels into ethanol, we still end up with 7.4 billion. But additionally, we have to add back in half of the bushels that we converted to ethanol because at least half, Madam Speaker, of that corn has a retained feed value in the protein that we did not use, the protein that goes back in livestock feed in the form of DDG, dried distiller's grain.
So you add 1.6 billion bushels back in, and that says last year, 2007 crop, the average annual domestic corn crop for the decade is 7.4 billion, but the 2007 year, there's 9 billion bushels of corn that were available for domestic consumption. That says the supply for domestic consumption went up, not down. If the supply went up, then we can't be arguing that the food-versus-fuel argument, although I will say that if you dump 3.2 billion bushels of corn into the domestic market, and it would push the price, and that would be a lot better for our livestock producers, especially our pork producers.
But that's not the case. It's 9 billion bushels available where 7.4 normally are available. I think that takes that argument away that the high costs that are there today that are putting so much pressure on our pork producers are at the burden of ethanol, yes, it's part of it. It's part of it.
But, Madam Speaker, I will submit that the low dollar is a bigger part of it. And according to some financial experts that I have met with, people whom I respect, their judgment is sound and they're well respected in the country, the cheap dollar has more to do with high grain prices and high gas prices than most people will calculate.
So, for example, if about 35 percent of the value of our commodities, such as crude oil, is wrapped up in the cheap dollar, we could take
$129 crude oil and say well, about two-thirds of that is where oil would be today if our dollar were shored back up and it was more traditional values than it is right now. And I know that some think that we should try to encourage the European Union to devalue their Euro. I don't know that that can be done from the United States any more effectively than we can convince the Saudis to put more crude oil out on the marketplace.
But we can shore up the value of the dollar, Madam Speaker. We can and we should shore up the value of the dollar. And we ought to take some dollars out of circulation. We ought to make an announcement that we're going to hold a tighter money supply and push the value of the dollar up. If that happens, and we can get the dollar back to its traditional values, the gas that we're looking at today that on the streets tomorrow or by next week will be $3.80 a gallon, would only be, with a more traditional value of our dollar, about $2.47 a gallon. That's still too high in my view, Madam Speaker.
So the combination of these things, the combination of the speculators that expect that energy is going to be more scarce in the future, is driving up the price of energy, the intimidation effect of windfall profit taxes and higher regulations and the constant beating that the energy supply companies take here on the floor of this Congress pushes up the energy prices.
The bill that passed today that was debated yesterday, the NOPEC bill, the bill that says it's unlawful for the organization, the petroleum export companies, OPEC, the bill that says it's unlawful for OPEC to exist and grants the authority to the Department of Justice to sue those OPEC countries, and if they successfully bring suit, one could presume that they could freeze the accounts of the investments of those oil companies here in the United States, at least the sovereign wealth accounts that they might have invested in U.S. products. It is a move that drives up more energy prices.
The Middle Eastern countries that are part of OPEC, because when we passed NOPEC here in this Congress, they are not going to produce more energy to get Congress off their back because they know Congress doesn't know how much energy they produce. They know this, that the oil that sits underneath their land is their oil, and they will market it in a way that serves their interest best. That's the bottom line. That's free market capitalism. And even though a lot of those countries don't have the level of freedom that we have, they do understand the market system.
So if we say to them that we're going to turn the attorney general loose, create a task force to study this and then give the attorney general the authority, the Department of Justice the authority to bring suit against the OPEC countries, I'll submit this, Madam Speaker, they're not going to produce more energy; the best we could hope for is they produce the same amount of energy, and we have to hope that they don't reduce that energy supply, and we have to hope that they don't pull their capital out of the United States out of fear that their assets could potentially be frozen in the aftermath of a suit that could be brought by the attorney general.
Only bad things can come from the NOPEC bill that passed the floor of this Congress. It's going to make energy either the same or more scarce. Just like every other piece of energy legislation that's been brought in this Pelosi Congress that's made energy more scarce, more expensive, provided more regulations and more intimidation, more taxes on our energy producing companies. That's wrong.
And what we have been doing is growing an industry. We've been growing the corn-based ethanol industry. This piece right here. This probably, by now, exceeded 1 percent of our overall energy consumption in the United States.
We need to, Madam Speaker, grow the size of the energy pie. This is the energy production chart, 71.7 quadrillion Btu's of energy produced from all of these sources, and they come with crude oil, liquefied petroleum, natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydro-electric, geothermal, ethanol, biodiesel, solar, wind, all of these sources. This is the energy production chart, 71.7 quadrillion Btu's. This is the energy pie that we need to grow.
We need to grow this energy pie to the size of this energy pie, Madam Speaker. This one that is 101.6 quadrillion Btu's. Now this circle should be bigger in proportion to the one behind it. We will get our graphics down a little better later on, Madam Speaker, but this is what we need to do: grow the size of the energy pie so the energy-
consumption chart, which is behind here, excuse me, the energy-
production chart, which is behind here, equals or exceeds the size of the energy consumption chart which is this one here, the 101.6 quadrillion Btu's.
If we do that, we will see energy prices go down in America, we will see gas at a price that a working man and woman can afford it again, and we will see ourselves become significantly less dependent, in fact independent from foreign sources of energy and oil and, and if we do that, the prospects for America's balance of trade, the prospects for the stability of our currency, the prospects for the future of the United States of America, of our children and grandchildren and each succeeding generation, gets greater and greater.
That is our responsibility, Madam Speaker. It is our responsibility to advance the American dream. Advance it for our children and advance it for our grandchildren. We need to do that with a comprehensive approach to the big picture in every way that we can. We cannot do it by increasing the cost of energy by making it more scarce and intimidating our energy-producing companies. That's the theme that the American people understand.
And I will submit, Madam Speaker, that the clearest thing for the American people to understand is drill ANWR. Drill in ANWR, drill now, drill as fast as we can. It doesn't take any 10 years to get that energy on the marketplace.
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How can we, on the one hand, how can we say, well, there's only enough energy up there to last for 5 years and we can't get it into the marketplace for 10? That doesn't make sense to me, not in a Nation that can have a Manhattan Project that can, in a few very short years, produce an atom bomb and deliver it, or in a few very short years, from the time John F. Kennedy said we're going to the moon, by 1969 we were on the moon.
A Nation that can produce a nuclear weapon in the fashion that we did, a Nation that can go to the moon in the fashion that we did has got to get the regulations and the taxes out of the way so that we can produce the energy that we need in the form of ethanol and biodiesel and wind and solar and nuclear and hydroelectric. And the list goes on and on and on, including coal, gas, diesel fuel, et cetera.
Madam Speaker, it's commonsense to the American people. Let's first drill ANWR and send that message that this Nation is finally ready to produce energy. Let's do that, and let's take it a step at a time, or all at once if we can, but whatever we do, we owe it to our children and grandchildren to grow the size of the energy production pie in the United States of America.
With that, Madam Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence. It's a privilege to address you.
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