[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 52 (Wednesday, April 21, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4182-S4183]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                 ENERGY

  Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I want to talk a little bit about energy. We 
have regulated ourselves out of business. We have regulated ourselves 
to higher prices. We have regulated ourselves so the source of our oil 
is in the Middle East.
  In 1973 we had a crisis. Senator Hansen was the Senator from Wyoming 
who held this seat. I had him speak to a Wyoming Jaycees session about 
what was happening when we got cut off from oil in the Middle East. 
Beginning then, Senators were saying we needed to do something so we 
would never have an oil crisis again, that we could not be dependent on 
the Middle East.
  I think we were at 35 percent use from the Middle East at that time. 
We are now at 60 percent use from the Middle East. They hold us in the 
palm of their hand for our money. Our money is sponsoring whatever 
happens in the Middle East. They don't base the price on true supply 
and demand. They control the price.
  I once got to meet the fellow who determined how many barrels they 
ought to ship, to raise the price or lower the price. Lower the price, 
you say? Yes, lower the price. If you lower the price drastically you 
can drive production in the United States out of business. They have 
done it twice. They have driven it out of business. What happens when 
the price shoots back up and we buy more oil from them? The U.S. 
production cannot recover because the people who used to be in that 
business had to find other work. Finding trained people in that 
business, to do what they had been doing, is impossible. That is how 
the Middle East has manipulated us twice that I know of. I think they 
do it, on a much more minute basis, on a regular basis now.
  Earlier there were some numbers over there on a chart. It showed 77 
cents as the cost of a gallon of crude oil. Then it showed manufacture, 
and it showed the filling station--manufacture at 25 cents, filling 
station at 10 cents, and Federal taxes at 52 cents, which came to 
$1.64, which was listed as the fair price for a gallon of gas.
  I love to get into the numbers because I am the only accountant in 
the Senate. That is based, I guess, on 42 gallons of oil to the barrel. 
But 42 gallons at the current price would be 88 cents a gallon, not 77 
cents a gallon. But that is based on the whole 42 gallons being able to 
be made into gasoline when in fact you end up with 19.4 gallons--yes, 
less than half of what was in that barrel actually is able to go into 
your car gas tank. So instead of 88 cents--well, there are byproducts 
they get to sell, too, and that is how they are able to hold it down, I 
guess.
  I want to comment a little bit on the 25 cents, the 25 cents that 
goes to the refiner. The 25 cents that goes to the refiner is not 
profit. Boy, I bet they wish it were. The 10 cents that goes to the 
filling station is not profit. That is the difference between what they 
buy it for and what they sell it for. All of them have to provide 
employees, they have to provide facilities, and they have to pay taxes. 
So there are a lot of costs that go into it.
  Particularly with the refinery again, we need to have regulations to 
make sure we keep our environment clean, but we have to be sure what we 
are doing is what really needs to be done. Nobody is building a 
refinery in this country anymore--nobody. In fact, we are reducing the 
number of refineries, which means we are reducing our capacity to 
provide what needs to be provided, and at the same time we are saying 
there have to be a whole bunch of different kinds of gasoline.
  These gasolines are going to be designed which means they are more 
complicated for particular parts of the country. If you keep doing 
that, you keep driving up the price. That is part of the 25 cents that 
the refiner has to use. The more you increase the cost and reduce that 
25 cents, the less gas you are going to have in this country.
  I was out in California a while ago. The Senator from California was 
making some of these speeches.
  I have to say I don't think you have seen anything in the way of an 
energy crisis yet, unless we can do something with an energy bill.
  I was out in California. As you go from Las Vegas, you will see this 
real dark cloud that appears. That is coming from California. When I 
was there, I found that they have a pooling lane for high-occupancy 
vehicles. You need two people in the car to be a high-occupancy 
vehicle. I have never driven on a wide road like that in Wyoming, but 
out there they have five and six lanes. One of those lanes is saved for 
people who carpool. I think it was rush hour. I can tell you that the 
other five lanes were jammed with traffic. They weren't going anywhere. 
My wife and I in our car constituted the two and we could use the 
pooling lane. We just zipped right through. It was absolutely amazing.
  But I thought I must be seeing half of California's population 
stalled, creating pollution and not carpooling like they are suggesting 
the rest of us ought to do.
  There are some things that can be done, which need to be done and 
hopefully will be done.
  But you haven't seen anything in the way of energy prices, if we 
don't get a national energy policy and don't get some reliability as to 
what we have in the United States.
  We have been touting natural gas as clean fuel, and it is. But there 
is only

[[Page S4183]]

one State that has an increase in the amount of natural gas it is 
producing. That is Wyoming. The rest of them are declining.
  Let us see what happens if the use slows up and the supply goes down. 
Oh, the price goes up. You could be seeing the lowest prices in energy 
that you are ever going to see if we could use some of that U.S. 
ingenuity and figure out ways to make hydrogen out of the coal or other 
things. But I do have a lot of faith in U.S. ingenuity, provided we 
don't regulate them out of business.

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