[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 48 (Thursday, April 27, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H1898-H1905]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        ENERGY PRICES IN AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the privilege 
to address you. In addressing you, I recognize the American people's 
ears are tuned as well. It is a precious right we have, our freedom of 
speech we have in this country, and we exercise it on the floor of this 
Congress on a regular basis, and I appreciate it on both sides of the 
aisle.
  I came to the floor this evening, Mr. Speaker, to address the energy 
situation that we have in the United States of America. We have watched 
our gas prices go up to $3 a gallon and more in the last few weeks. 
There was a time when it was headed in that direction, and it headed 
back down again, and now it is back up, and who knows where it is going 
to stop. We never know where it is going to stop.
  The American people are concerned about this, Mr. Speaker, and they 
should be. We have debated energy on this floor many, many times, and 
we have kicked back and forth issue after issue that has to do with how 
we are going to provide an adequate energy supply to keep this economy 
churning.
  This economy is churning, Mr. Speaker. It is churning consistently. 
It has got some really unprecedented growth. Ten of the last eleven 
succeeding quarters have had more than 3 percent growth in our gross 
domestic product. That is a growth rate that one has to go back to the 
early Reagan years to match.
  Yet this growth rate that we have in this environment, this more than 
3 percent growth of our gross domestic product for 10 of the last 11 
succeeding quarters, or preceding quarters, is matched back to those 
Reagan years. But in those years, we were under high inflation, high 
unemployment and high interest rates.

                              {time}  1900

  It was a lot harder to make a predictable profit back in those early 
years than it is in this environment. Today, this is 3 percent growth-
plus. It is more than 3 percent growth, but we are doing this in an 
environment of relatively low interest rates and lower unemployment 
rates and lower inflation rates. So this economy has had perhaps the 
longest run and been the healthiest economic environment I have seen in 
my lifetime.
  I am thankful President Bush stood up and took the lead after the 
bursting of the dot-com bubble, which sent the United States toward a 
recession. As the dot-com bubble burst, we had speculators that were 
investing in our new technological ability to store and transfer 
information faster than ever before without regard to what that value 
was worth in the marketplace. And so the economy, the dot-com bubble 
burst, and that sent us towards a recession, and some will say in a 
recession.
  And then right in that recession we saw the September 11 attack on 
the United States, on our financial centers, on the Pentagon, and of 
course on the plane that crashed in the field in Pennsylvania. And that 
was an attack, again, on our financial centers with an attempt to 
cripple our economy. Well, not only did it hit a difficult hard blow to 
our economy but, at the same time, this Congress made the decision to 
spend hundreds of billions of dollars in homeland security, so we also 
had to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in our Department of 
Defense funding to carry out this global war on terror.
  So we increased our spending in defense, we created a Department of 
Homeland Security, and we dramatically grew the spending in homeland 
security all at the time when our economy was being compressed and 
reduced because of the hit on our financial centers of September 11 and 
because of the bursting of the dot-com bubble. And the vision of 
President Bush was that we had to cut taxes to stimulate the economy, 
and so we did that.
  We did that in two rounds here in this Congress, Mr. Speaker. And we 
said today that last year our revenue increase by 14\1/2\ percent 
greater than anticipated, and this year it is going to be double digits 
again, greater than anticipated. These tax cuts have worked. They have 
brought us out of this recession that was caused by the bursting of the 
dot-com bubble and the September 11 attacks.
  But into the middle of all of this we have the energy issue, the 
energy issue that has gas prices up to $3 a gallon or more as it 
becomes closer and closer, potentially, to an energy crisis. Now, 
someone once asked, what is the solution to $3 gas? All of America is 
asking that question today. What is the solution to $3 gas? And some 
wag responded, well, $3 gas is the solution to $3 gas. Now, I am not 
sure that $3 gas brings us the answer to this, but I do believe $4 or 
$5 or $6 gas will bring solutions to a lot of our energy problems in 
this country and energy problems around the world.
  We have been, really, beneficiaries of a fairly cheap fuel over the 
years. We have had good access to resources here in the United States; 
and our oil companies, especially American oil companies, have gone 
overseas, developed the oil supplies in the Middle East, for example, 
the Libyan oil fields and the Iraqi and Iranian oil fields, and the 
list goes on. Our American companies have been integral to the 
development of the oil supply that is coming to the United States 
today, and that oil is coming out of the ground cheap, and it came to 
the United States cheap.
  Not very long ago we had gas at a $1.07. I don't remember anyone in 
America saying since we have such cheap gas prices, we ought to pay a 
little extra to these oil companies that have invested their capital to 
go out and drill and explore around the world so that we have an 
adequate supply of

[[Page H1899]]

energy. No, American consumers did what consumers do: they pumped the 
$1.07 gas in their cars, they drove a little more, and maybe bought a 
car that burned a little more gas and got a little less mileage than 
they might have otherwise and looked at that as something that was 
going to go on, cheap gas into perpetuity.
  But we know that those situations have a way of coming home to roost. 
We are the beneficiaries of an energy policy that was driven globally 
by capital investment of American oil companies and the people who 
invested in those American oil companies. And the import oil that was 
coming in was coming in to America cheap. But today it is a different 
environment. That environment has turned.
  And as we saw our prices go up during Katrina and Rita, when our 
refineries were shut down, down in the gulf coast, a good number of our 
platforms were wiped out in the hurricanes in the gulf coast and a 
large percentage of America's energy supply was shut down during and in 
the aftermath of Katrina. It took us a while to get back on line, and 
it is going to take us a while longer to get our production back up to 
where it was prior to Katrina. Some of the refineries are not back up 
to speed yet; and some of the platforms, I understand, are not quite up 
to speed yet either.
  So we don't have the American supply of either oil or natural gas 
coming that we had prior to Hurricane Katrina, and yet there is work to 
be done. We passed some energy bills here in the last couple of years. 
We passed two that I recall. One of them addressed the situation of not 
having enough refineries. But in the United States we have not built a 
new oil refinery since 1976. Now, that works out to be 30 years, Mr. 
Speaker, without building a refinery.
  It is true we have expanded some of the ones we had, but we have also 
shut down a significant number of those that we had. Our ability to 
refine our oil for our consumption here in the United States has 
diminished to where we cannot meet that demand of refining all of our 
own today. And that is an important component. It is important we are 
able to refine all the oil that we consume in America, that we produce 
and consume in America. That gives us at least a modicum of 
independence from the price of foreign oil.
  So we took some steps here in this Congress to site some new refinery 
locations and to provide so that we could build those refineries and 
get them up on line. It takes a little while to do that. We just 
initiated that, and along came Rita and Katrina, and it set us back 
again. So we find ourselves in this situation where our domestic 
supplies have been reduced at the very time that the threat of violence 
around the world has slowed down some of the oil supply that is coming 
through, and it has diminished the optimism of the investor market.
  I look at what is going on in Iran, for example, and the nuclear 
threat that they have become. They have clearly stated to the world 
over and over again, we are going to enrich our uranium, and they claim 
that they have. They put on a play where they had dancers dancing 
around on the stage each with a vile of enriched uranium to demonstrate 
that their 164 centrifuges are now producing this enriched uranium. And 
they need dozens and perhaps hundreds more to be able to produce a 
large enough quantity to produce a bomb.
  But if they are telling the truth about their ability to enrich the 
uranium, and I believe they are; and if they are telling the truth 
about their conviction to move forward to develop a bomb, and I believe 
they are, then it is just a matter of time. And the time question is 
whether it is months or years before they get to that point where they 
will be able to have a nuclear weapon.
  It was just announced this morning that they have purchased the means 
to deliver it, a means that would give them as much as a 2,000 mile 
range if they could put a nuclear warhead on top of the missiles that 
they allege and announced today that they have acquired from North 
Korea. So this is a serious threat to the world, and not just the peace 
of the world. It is a threat to the survival of Israel. And that, Mr. 
Speaker, might be another subject; but it is a threat to the entire 
energy production and delivery system of the world.
  So we have a rogue nation, an evil empire, if they are not quite an 
empire yet, Iran, which is sitting on those massive supplies of oil and 
developing nuclear capability because, they claim, at least they used 
to claim, that they need a nuclear capability to generate electricity 
in Iran. That an oil-rich nation would develop a nuclear capability to 
generate electricity never was a believable allegation, especially when 
you are considered a nation that doesn't have the ability to refine its 
own crude oil for the gas that goes into the cars they drive around in 
cities like Tehran.
  One would think, if they wanted to move into the future world, they 
would do so by building refineries so they could refine the crude oil 
that they pump out of the ground in Iran, burn the gas and the diesel 
fuel in the nation of Iran, and export a refined product rather than a 
crude oil product. But, no, Mr. Speaker, their priorities went towards 
developing a nuclear capability.
  It has put the world on notice that we are at great risk today, and 
that risk is missiles that will soon be aimed at, if not today, aimed 
at places like Tel Aviv, probably not Jerusalem right away. But the 
threats to annihilating Israel will force them, I think, to take action 
if there isn't some other solution.
  Well, the energy world is looking at this volatile situation in Iran, 
and they understand that Israel cannot, if they are going to survive as 
a nation, sit back and wait and walk through this diplomatic jungle and 
allow Iran to have a nuclear capability. They cannot wait. And we here 
in the United States must also take a responsibility to eliminate a 
nation's ability to conduct a nuclear strike against their neighbors. 
This cannot be tolerated.
  Yet as the world markets look at this, they understand also the risk 
that there will be some military action someday in Iran. If that action 
takes place, and some say when that action takes place, there is a high 
risk that the oil production out of that region between Iran and 
potentially Iraq could be shut down. If that is shut down, there will 
be a tremendous impact on the energy prices all over the world.
  That tremendous impact will affect the global prices for oil that are 
now at all-time highs and have gone from, not very long ago, $15 a 
barrel to, the last I checked, $75 a barrel. And you think how can we 
have $3 gas? Well, think in terms of $75 a barrel and there is 42 
gallons in a barrel. When it gets up to $84 a barrel, if you have 100 
percent gas out of a barrel, then you would still be at $2 just to 
purchase the crude. Then you would have to go through the refinery 
process and peel out the oil and the diesel fuel and pay for the energy 
consumption that it takes to crack out a gallon of gas. But $3 gas is 
not a price gouge if you are buying the oil at $75 a barrel.
  I will say, in defense of the oil companies, that they have invested 
their capital. They have done the research and development. They have 
done the field exploration. They have identified their reserves of oil. 
And when they have done so, that has been their capital that was 
invested. They had to invest on the prospects of being able to find new 
oil fields and then expand their wells into those and set up a 
distribution system that could come back to the market. And in this 
process of doing that, they need to make a profit if they are going to 
have the capital to do any more exploration.
  So I am not one, Mr. Speaker, that would say that we should put a 
windfall profit tax on the very people that are producing the most oil 
for us, because they are the ones that are contributing to the overall 
supply of energy. And those that contribute to the overall supply of 
energy are the ones doing the most to keep the price down, Mr. Speaker.
  So a windfall profits tax acts in the opposite direction. If I am 
Enron, for example, and I made $10-something billion in a quarter, and 
if we are making noises from the floor of this Congress like, way to 
go, Enron, you produced a lot of oil and we know you made some money; 
we hope you invest that back in oil exploration in places in the world 
so that there is a supply for us this year, next year, a decade from 
now, a generation from now, so that oil comes

[[Page H1900]]

back to the United States and we can consume it. We need this energy 
supply. If we just go out there and starve the goose that lays the 
golden oil, or golden barrel of crude oil, eventually we will find the 
prices of crude going up higher and higher and higher because there 
will be less supply.
  So we have done some things in this country that were not very smart, 
and it has been because our hands have been tied here and over in the 
Senate by environmentalists. It isn't so much that they are concerned 
something is going to happen to the environment. I have a difficult 
time looking around the oil fields and finding damage to the 
environment. It is more, I think, just a belief system, almost a 
religion, if you will, Mr. Speaker, that if you label it green, more 
than half the Members of this Congress will vote against oil 
exploration or oil development or energy development. If you label it 
something green is against, I should say. If you label it renewable, 
then they are for it, whether it is practical or whether it isn't.
  We need to do a lot of things in this country; and when I look around 
at the oil exploration in America, it has diminished dramatically. The 
offshore drilling in America is almost shut down entirely, and that is 
for both oil and natural gas.
  Now, we have developed our natural gas fields in the Gulf Coast, 
around New Orleans and the coast of Texas. But when you go east and 
start along the Mississippi and Florida and Alabama, I need to get 
those people in there, you find that the panhandle of Florida runs 
along the Gulf Coast quite a ways. But to drill for even natural gas 
offshore in Florida, even 199.9 miles out offshore has been blocked and 
banned by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans from Florida, a 
coalition of Democrats from America, and some people that have jumped 
on board there that are northeastern Republicans that don't seem to 
understand that their homes need to be heated, their cars need gas in 
them, and their factories need natural gas.

                              {time}  1915

  If they are going to produce anything from a factory standpoint, they 
need natural gas to fire that. And the food that they eat is all grown 
with nitrogen, Mr. Speaker, and our nitrogen fertilizer that is the 
backbone of our corn-producing industry in America, 90 percent of the 
cost of our nitrogen fertilizer is the cost of the natural gas that it 
takes as a feedstock to produce the natural gas.
  So as we shut down our exploration and drilling here in the United 
States under the misguided notion that somehow we are protecting an 
environment, an environment that, let me say, Mr. Speaker, in the 
history of the world, of all of the offshore wells that have been 
drilled or the onshore wells that have been drilled for natural gas, I 
cannot find a single incident where there has been a pollution caused 
by that gas that came from the drilling. Not offshore or onshore.
  We saw natural gas escaping down off the gulf coast of New Orleans. 
As it bubbled out of the water, only two things can happen. One is it 
evaporates into the air and dissipates. And the other is if you strike 
a match to it, you will burn that gas off. But, Mr. Speaker, that is 
not a pollution to our environment.
  Yet the environmentalists want to block all of the drilling that we 
can possibly provide here in the United States. They want to block it 
on land and on sea. And if we could find some natural gas in the air, 
they would try to block that, too.
  There is enough natural gas beneath the nonnational park public lands 
in America to heat every home in this country for the next 150 years, 
and yet there is an environmentalist barrier into tapping into that 
natural gas. There are 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas up on the 
North Slope of Alaska, in the oil fields that we have already 
developed, those oil fields that feed the Alaska pipeline. That is 38 
trillion cubic feet already developed oil there. We need to build a 
pipeline to run that down to the lower 48 States, and there is more 
undiscovered gas up there without a doubt, and it is right next door to 
ANWR.
  But I mentioned a little earlier the delegation from Florida, and 
with a coalition of Democrats and Northeastern Republicans, they have 
blocked all drilling offshore for natural gas and oil. But the Outer 
Continental Shelf, that area from the shoreline to 200 miles out, which 
is where we make claim to the mineral rights, out to 200 miles, the 
people who are the tourist trade in Florida are afraid that if someone 
goes out there to drill a well way beyond the line of sight of anyone 
sitting on a beach in Florida, the mere mention of that will, even 
though it is beyond the line of sight of people sitting on a beach in 
Florida, will keep people from going on vacation in Florida.
  You know, they have to burn something in their homes to heat them. 
They have to do something to generate electricity in Florida. I am 
told, and I have not verified this to my satisfaction or I would tell 
you that I know it to be factually correct, but conceptually I believe 
it is, that there are 33 electric generating plants planned for the 
State of Florida for this year, and that 28 of them are natural-gas-
fired; natural-gas-fired electrical generating plants sitting in a 
State that is surrounded by natural gas on the Outer Continental Shelf, 
but we cannot tap into that gas, Mr. Speaker, because someone might 
find out that we drilled a well offshore out of sight of the beaches 
and not go to Florida to sit on the beach. That is the rationale that 
is going on.
  There is no threat to the environment, none whatsoever. Historically 
there has been no damage at all.
  Mr. Speaker, 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas on the North Slope 
of Alaska and 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas on the Outer 
Continental Shelf of the United States. That is 406 trillion cubic 
feet, and a lot has still not been properly inventoried.
  So we have this massive supply of natural gas. We have seen our 
natural gas prices go up as many as five times the retail price. I will 
say it has gone up five to six times in the last 5 to 6 years is the 
best way to describe that.
  So we are all paying the price of high natural gas. We are paying a 
price for higher fertilizer in the Corn Belt. It is costing us more to 
heat our homes, and it is costing us a lot more to produce our 
plastics, which require natural gas in their production. The list of 
the burden on the economy goes on and on.
  Every component of this economy, everything that we sell and buy in 
America, all has an energy component. It takes energy to produce 
everything that we do, and it takes energy also to deliver it; that is, 
the transportation component. So if you are going to produce a widget, 
it is going to take energy to produce the widget, and then you have to 
ship it to a warehouse and to a retail outlet. You have to send a 
salesperson, and that takes energy. If you just do this by telephone 
and over the Internet, assuming you can compete that way, that takes 
energy as well.
  Here sits the United States of America, the number one consumer of 
energy and the number one producer by almost every broad measure that 
there is, and we have not provided to produce an adequate amount of 
energy in the United States of America when we are sitting right on top 
of it.
  Listening to me talk, Mr. Speaker, one would think that I am for 
drilling in ANWR, drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf; and, Mr. 
Speaker, I am. I will go back to ANWR in a little bit, but I want to 
add that I am for another concept here entirely, and that is we need to 
grow the size of the energy pie.
  But on the ANWR issue with the crude oil aspect of this, the 
environmentalists will say, no, there is not enough oil there to bother 
to poke a hole, so we are just going to block it here on this floor.
  I remember we had a vote here on the floor on an energy bill a couple 
of years ago. The vote was on whether we would allow drilling in ANWR. 
The language read that they would disturb no more than 2,000 acres of 
ANWR. I read that language, and I think about 2,000 acres conceptually. 
I am from farm country, and I look at a square section of ground or a 
40 or an 80, whatever it is, and I think in those terms.
  In my mind's eye when I think 2,000 acres, I think three sections, a 
little more. But with only 2 minutes left on the vote, I had Members 
come to me and say, This is drilling in ANWR, and it is limited to 
2,000 acres. You are from Iowa; how much is 2,000 acres? Excuse me. How 
much is an acre? That

[[Page H1901]]

was the first question. How much is an acre? It is 208 by 208 feet, or 
the same size as a country school. This list went on. I tried to 
describe it some other ways. None of that seemed to register.
  Well, what is 2,000 acres, they would ask me. I said, it is not even 
a big farm in Iowa anymore; a little more than average, but not big. 
They seemed to absorb that information, go down and put their card in 
and vote ``no'' on drilling in ANWR. That was the information and 
research that seemed to be a deciding factor.
  They did not want to disturb 2,000 acres out of 19.6 million acres, 
and this is just going on the 2,000 acres of the coastal plain itself. 
You do the calculation, and it turns out to be the 2,000 acres just of 
ANWR. Not even doing the calculation of all of Alaska, but just of ANWR 
is 0.01 percent. That is 1/100th of 1 percent of the ANWR region. Of 
the 19.6 million acres that is the ANWR region, that is all that would 
be disturbed to pull out of it this massive supply of oil that I happen 
to have on this chart.
  Now, this is the reserve that is ANWR. All of U.S. proven reserves 
total a little more than 21 billion barrels of oil. When we add ANWR to 
this, it adds another 10.4 billion barrels of oil. That adds another 50 
percent to the supply, and this piece up here would go almost off the 
charts. If you can add half again to the U.S. oil supply, why wouldn't 
you do that?
  If anyone went up to the North Slope of Alaska and would see where we 
developed the oil fields and see where we set up the Alaska pipeline 
and pump that oil down here for years now, and that began in 1972. Yes, 
1972 is when the construction began. So we are 34 years into this. We 
have been delivering oil for 30-plus years down here to the United 
States, and we have had a spill of a tanker. We have had a couple of 
small spills on the ground, all cleaned up. I have not heard the news 
about it being anything else. It has been a good, sound environmental 
approach that came up there in Alaska, and they created a lot of the 
science and technology. The environmental compatibility has been 
developed up there.

  If you look at the North Slope of Alaska, the identical topography of 
ANWR, it is right next door, what I see up there is you have to show 
somebody where the oil fields are. The oil fields on the North Slope of 
Alaska, people are thinking they are going to go there looking for pump 
jacks sitting there pumping, and maybe see an oil derrick, and maybe 
they are thinking of oil spilling out of the pipe. They do not see it 
as a neat, green, environmentally friendly region.
  But on the trip up there to the North Slope when we flew over those 
North Slope oil fields, and I have worked in the oil fields, I looked 
down, and they said, we are over the oil fields now. I said, I do not 
see them; can you point them out to me? They had to point them out to 
me.
  It turns out there are no roads that go to these wells. You cannot 
see the collector lines that are the smaller pipelines that have to be 
collecting this oil from the wells that go to the main terminal, or 
collection stations before they go to the main terminal. What you will 
see from the air if it is pointed out to you is a work-over pad that is 
perhaps white rock, limestone rock. I am not sure what kind of rock it 
is up there, but it is piled 2, 3, 4 feet above the Arctic tundra. It 
is perhaps 50 feet wide, 150 feet long. But it is a small pad. That is 
all that designates where the well is. There is not a derrick sitting 
there. There is not a pump jack sitting there. These are submersible 
pumps. There is zero clearance, and there is nothing that sticks up out 
of the ground. That pad is there so in the wintertime, if they need to 
work on a well, if a pump fails or they want to do some maintenance, 
they build an ice road in the wintertime.
  It is easy to come by ice in the wintertime in that country. They 
send the trucks out, they pull the truck over on the pad, set up the 
work-over rig, pull the pump out, fix the pump or replace it and drop 
it back down in, trip the pipe in, hook it back up, and they are good 
to go. They have quite a few months of the year that they can work 
there, but they do not go into that region and work during the period 
of time when it is a thaw. So it is a very environmentally friendly oil 
field on the North Slope.
  ANWR would be even more environmentally friendly because we have the 
ability to directionally drill. So we can set up on one of those pads, 
set the drill rig out, and we can drill out in directions in a radial 
pattern, however the geology directs it to be drilled, and pull a lot 
of oil into one location without having to go set up a pad here and a 
rig there and without having to disturb some tundra.
  Mr. Speaker, while I am on the subject of disturbed tundra, I would 
add also that I saw some tundra that had been disturbed, and we are 
told by the environmentalists that it cannot be reestablished. Once you 
put a track in the tundra, with a bulldozer or a truck or a caribou, 
that that track is there in perpetuity; that it never comes back again; 
that it is such a fragile environment that any damage to any plant 
life, any depression that would be pushed into the thawed surface of 
the tundra is there almost forever.
  Well, if that is the case, I do not know how they can tolerate 
allowing caribou to walk across that country because they definitely 
put tracks in there and leave those tracks behind them. Mother Nature 
has a way of recovering from these things.
  The president of the corporation that represents the city of Kaktovik 
up in ANWR right on the shore of the Arctic Ocean told me that they 
have reestablished tundra. They will go out there and drag it smooth. 
They can seed it. Actually, the soil has seed that is already in it, 
and in 5 to 6 years that tundra is reestablished and grown back. I saw 
some of that. It had a little brighter green than the older tundra, 
just like new seeding in your lawn has a little brighter green than the 
more established seeding of a lawn that has been there for awhile. But 
we have not damaged any tundra. Any bit we have has been reestablished.
  The risk to the wildlife is nonexistent. That has always been a 
farce. The caribou herd that is on the North Slope that everyone was so 
concerned about was 7,000 caribou back in 1972. Today it is over 28,000 
caribou that are there.
  One reporter told me of course there are all those caribou, the 
pipeliners shot all of the wolves. Well, I guess you can reach a long 
way to make an argument if that is what you want to make, Mr. Speaker; 
but, no, the pipeliners did not shoot all of the wolves.
  I was signed up to go up there. It was a difficult contract that one 
had to agree to.

                              {time}  1930

  They sent only men up there into that region back in 1972. And there 
were some pretty tough rules that one had to live by. One of them was 
no alcohol. The other one was no guns. The other one was no gambling, 
and the other one was no women. So you know with those kinds of 
restraints on there, they had to pay a lot of money to get people to go 
up there and work, and they did. It was a good-paying job then. But no 
guns was part of it. They didn't want violence to erupt up there in the 
camps. So with no guns it is kind of hard to shoot all the wolves. In 
fact, it is kind of hard to shoot a wolf anyway if you are busy trying 
to make a living and working seven days a week as was scheduled there.
  And so the caribou herd now has gone from 7,000 to 28,000 head and 
the environment, if it were damaged at all, if there was any proof of 
it all, you can bet we would have heard about it on the floor of this 
Chamber, Mr. Speaker. But we did not. And we didn't hear about it 
because there hasn't been significant damage.
  And so here we have a north slope oil field that is winding down, and 
a pipeline coming down from Alaska that needs to have oil in it. If it 
doesn't continue to have oil in it, eventually, if it sits empty, it 
will degrade. And if sits empty very long, it will degrade to the point 
where it has to be replaced.
  It is to our interest to keep oil flowing through that for a lot of 
reasons. One is just to keep the pipeline up so that it doesn't degrade 
and require us at some point to either replace it or simply demolish it 
or abandon it. But the other reason is we sit here with an ability to 
add another 50 percent to our overall American supply of crude oil, 
half again more; this 21 billion going to 31.4 billion, up to the top 
of the chart, Mr. Speaker. And we are watching this exploration of U.S. 
oil diminish, diminish, diminish because of regulations,

[[Page H1902]]

because of environmentalist concern, because of limitations on the U.S. 
going out and leasing larger tracts of regions to be explored, 
particularly offshore. We lease them a small tract instead of a large 
tract. And so if a company goes out and leases a tract for oil 
exploration, and they are looking at their competition that has 
surrounded them with their leases, and they all speculate and get a 
little grid here and a little grid there, if you are sitting there and 
you have got a grid that is maybe, say, 5 miles by 5 miles, and I am 
just pulling a number out here, and your neighbors are all around you 
like a checkerboard, if you drill down and you find a massive supply of 
oil, the people that are your neighbors are going to capitalize on that 
without the risk that you have taken to do the wildcat exploration in 
that area. They will realize, well, there is an oil find in that 
section. And they will set down around you and drill the oil, and they 
will be able to take advantage of the things that you have learned by 
taking the risk as a single oil company.
  So the incentive to put millions and billions of dollars into oil 
exploration is diminished significantly because the opportunity to 
capitalize a good find has been diminished because of us leasing 
smaller tracts of land. Not so in a lot of other parts of the world 
where there are large areas that are leased out to large oil companies, 
and they can go in there and drill and come up with a find, and that 
returns then for them because they can continue to develop an entire 
field of oil.
  Australia, for example. I happen to know of some drilling that goes 
on down there in the Bass Straits between Tasmania and Australia and 
high currents there and thousand feet deep water, American companies 
down there drilling for oil, not drilling here in the United States, 
not drilling up in ANWR, not drilling offshore of the United States 
because regulations, environmental concerns, small leases, all those 
things have shut down the incentive for exploration in America. So our 
highly competent, highly technical, highly capitalized American oil 
companies are exploring everywhere else that they possibly can in the 
world, and they are contributing to our oil supply, and we should be 
grateful that that helps keep the price down.
  Now, if there is actually price gouging, and if there is actually a 
level of ethical corruption, yes, we need to find that, and we need to 
use the law to enforce it. But if it is supply and demand and people 
are working above board, a windfall profits tax on our oil companies 
will work against the interests of the United States. It will 
ultimately diminish the supply of energy here in the United States and 
perhaps in the world, and it will ultimately raise the price of gas, 
not lower the price of gas.
  We have got to have more energy in this country, not less energy in 
this country. This supply and demand reminds me of a story that Steve 
Simms of Idaho told years ago, I believe from this floor, perhaps, Mr. 
Speaker, and that is the story about, shortly after our Constitution 
was ratified in the post-1789 era, we didn't have crude oil at that 
time. We were using whale oil to light the lamps in our houses, and 
that is what we read by. And so Americans were sensitive to the price 
of whale oil. And the whalers went out from places like Nantucket and 
brought the whales in and extruded the oil, processed the oil off the 
whales, and then packaged that up and sold that around the country. You 
buy a little bit of whale oil, bring it in your house, fill your little 
container in your lamp, light the wick on your lamp and then you could 
read into the night. But that price of whale oil went up and up and up 
due to scarcity of whales.
  So Congress met and they had a bill before them that suggested that 
they would cap the price of whale oil, Mr. Speaker. And so they had an 
intense debate here on the floor of Congress. And the question was, 
should we limit the price of whale oil so that people can continue to 
afford to be able to buy the whale oil to light their lamps?
  What they did, Mr. Speaker, was they came to their senses. And the 
debate finally won out that, no, they would let the price of whale oil 
go up because if it went up, there would be people who would use some 
alternative fuels. Some of them would just simply blow out the light 
and go to bed and get up with the chickens in the morning. But those 
that had to pay more would find another alternative.
  Well, so the price of whale oil continued then to go up. And not very 
many years after that, oil was discovered in Pennsylvania. And you can 
guess what happened then, Mr. Speaker, to the price of whale oil. Once 
oil was discovered in Pennsylvania, there was a ready supply, a 
tremendous amount of oil available, and far more oil than they really 
had a use for in those years. And so it became very cheap to light some 
of that Pennsylvania oil. And the price of whale oil then dropped clear 
out the bottom because the demand disappeared because an alternative 
source of energy was discovered underground in Pennsylvania.
  That is how supply and demand works. And there will be other 
alternatives of energy that are developed if we provide for competition 
to help drive this and help us come up with solutions.
  So I want to talk about a solution here, Mr. Speaker. And this I 
consider to be a picture that gets us started on the solution. I have 
said for a long time, Mr. Speaker, that we can talk about one component 
of energy or another component of energy. But there is an overall 
demand for energy in quadrillion BTUs, and we should measure our 
overall supply and consumption of energy in quadrillion BTUs. And this 
is kind of how it is broken up today in the U.S. domestic supply. This 
is the energy that we supply in America. It is not our consumption. 
That is a different chart. But the domestic supply. And it is broken 
out here, as you can see. Of all the energy that we supply, that we 
produce here, 10.8 percent of the BTUs are crude oil; 2.3 percent of 
the BTUs are natural gas. Nuclear is 8.1 percent. Our hydroelectricity 
is kind of frozen in place. We haven't been able to expand that in 30 
or more years, but 2.7 percent. Biomass is a growing component of this, 
matches our hydroelectricity at 2.7 percent. The geothermal has a 
tremendous potential for us, and that technology is growing, I think, 
significantly and dramatically \3/10\ of 1 percent is all. Our solar is 
\6/100\ of a percent, a very small sliver, and that has good potential 
too, although it will take a while and a lot of capital.

  And our wind, \1/10\ of 1 percent. That also is a very much growing 
supply of energy. Our coal, we have been burning more and more coal, 23 
percent. And this natural gas, 18.7 percent. So we have a couple of 
different components here, the natural gas and our crude oil again at 
10.8 percent
  This is, Mr. Speaker, this illustration, this is the energy pie. The 
size of this circle demonstrates the overall supply of BTUs, or British 
thermal units, of energy that we produce here in this country. Now, our 
alternatives become this. Energy prices are high. And of these 
different kinds of energy that I have talked about, the price of crude 
oil has gone up dramatically. The price of natural gas has gone up 
dramatically, both of those being, of course, the hydrocarbons.
  Then the rest of these supplies, coal has gone up too. The freight on 
that coal has gone up dramatically in some cases. But overall, if you 
put more crude oil into the market, someone will decide, well, I am 
going to generate electricity with diesel fuel, for example. So they 
will decide if crude oil is cheaper, they might generate more 
electricity with crude oil. And this size, this percentage of the 
overall pie gets a little bigger. If the price of natural gas goes up, 
there will be people that will decide, well, I am going to go over here 
to this coal alternative. And I happen to know of a case where natural 
gas has gone so high that they are building an ethanol production plant 
that is going to burn coal to generate the heat, rather than use the 
natural gas which we have done in the rest of those that I am aware of.
  Now, as we look at this, we have also the subject matter that comes 
up of biodiesel and also ethanol, those two big pieces. And I will talk 
about those a little bit too. But our overall mission, we need to 
understand, is this: we need more energy in this country. We need to 
grow the size of the energy pie. We need to make this circle a lot 
bigger than it is today. When we have more BTUs that are available, the 
supply will lower the cost of our energy. Supply and demand, whether it 
is whale oil versus Pennsylvania crude

[[Page H1903]]

oil, or whether it is this more complicated equation that we have 
today, the overall supply, if we can increase it, we will lower the 
overall cost of energy.
  Now, some will be more competitive. Some will be less competitive. 
And as technology develops, it will change that as well. But growing 
the size of the energy pie is an essential thing for us here in 
America. We need to work on it every way we can. And that is why I say 
we need to drill in ANWR. We need to drill in the Outer Continental 
Shelf, both places, for gas and for oil.
  We need to expand our ethanol and our biodiesel dramatically. And we 
have been doing that, especially in my district. And I am quite 
grateful and proud of the work that has been done there. The industry 
essentially has been developed, home grown. We looked at ADM and 
Cargill and would like to have had them taking the lead on ethanol 
production in America, and they have producing ethanol for quite some 
time. They are actually, at least one, and perhaps both, building a new 
plant or two around the country, perhaps more than that. But they 
didn't jump into this with the idea that they were going to create a 
market and then supply that market of ethanol or biodiesel.
  And so, seeing the vision of this, and watching the brain child grow 
from within the region of the country that I come from, I happen to 
have shook the hand of the man who pumped the first gallon of ethanol 
in the United States of America the other day, State Senator Thurmond 
Gaskill from Corwith, Iowa. And I know they worked on that for years 
and years before they could get to the point where they could pump the 
first gallon of ethanol.
  And now, in this congressional district that I represent, we are 
sitting there either in production for ethanol, under construction or 
on the planning stages and soon going into construction, we will be at, 
by the end of next year, 14 ethanol production facilities in the 5th 
Congressional District, the western third of Iowa. We will be at least 
five biodiesel production facilities in the same district in those 32 
counties.
  Now, those 14 plants will pretty much have the whole region, then I 
will say polka dotted with those locations where they can draw the 
maximum amount of corn to those plants. And we have an ability perhaps 
to go up to, I will say, a third or maybe even as much as a half, half 
of our corn crop going into ethanol. But the balance of that comes back 
in the form of feed. So you will see a truck come in to an ethanol 
plant with a load of corn on it, and he will go through and dump that 
load of corn in the pit; and while he is sitting there dumping that 
load of corn, as it is being augured out, right in the next bay you 
will see a truck pulling in to load a load of DDGs, dried distillers 
grain, high-protein feed stock that is a by-product that comes out of 
the ethanol production. And that goes off to the feed lots to be fed to 
livestock.
  Then there is also CO2, a by-product that also gets 
marketed for an industrial market. So we capture almost everything in 
there. And the corn comes in. And then out of that corn we take, make 
the ethanol out of the starch; and we send the protein to the feed lot 
in the form of dried distillers grain, and capture the CO2 
as a by-product and market that in the industry; and that process goes 
over around and around again.
  Now, you have University of California Berkley and another 
institution joined together, or at least had concurrent reports that 
said that the production of ethanol takes several times more energy to 
produce than you actually get out of a gallon of ethanol.

                              {time}  1945

  And I looked at that. I did not actually read the study. It was not 
worth my trouble to do that. And I wondered why anybody would go to UC 
Berkeley to get some answers on ethanol when you could come to the Iowa 
State University or the University of Iowa or University of Northern 
Iowa or some Minnesota institutions where we have experience with 
ethanol, where we actually understand what goes on there, and we can 
give you some empirical data on the cost of the energy to produce 
ethanol.
  So I began to ask those questions, and one of them is how much energy 
does it take to produce a gallon of gasoline from crude oil? And it 
works out that if you are going to measure the BTUs, for the BTUs that 
would be in a gallon of gasoline, you only get eight-tenths that much 
out of it when you process and crack that out of crude oil. So does it 
take a gallon of gas to produce a gallon of gas? No. It takes a gallon 
of gas to produce 80 percent of a gallon of gas is the way they would 
calculate that.
  And ethanol works out far better. Once the corn is at the plant, and 
you have that in storage, and you process that through, if you consume 
the quantity of BTUs that are in a gallon of ethanol, you will produce 
3 gallons of ethanol with it. Just a skosh less than that, but the 
numbers are coming right at 3.
  So the return on energy is far more efficient to produce ethanol than 
it is to produce gas even out of crude oil. And all the energy has a 
composition component like that. It costs something to put it into a 
commodity that one can transfer, put into a tank and efficiently get a 
burn.
  So, Mr. Speaker, the goal here is let us lower our energy prices in 
America by growing the size of the energy pie. Let us expand the 
utilization of our clean-burning coal technology. We have an almost 
unlimited supply of that. Let us dramatically expand our ethanol. Let 
us take the entire Corn Belt and build out ethanol production all the 
way across the Midwest and as far south as they can compete in the corn 
production down there, and then, on top of that, continue to build our 
biodiesel production facilities out. The five that are in my district, 
that can go to 10 or 12 or 13 plants within the next 4 to 5 years. I 
actually expect it will go there. And the biodiesel production that we 
produce, every time we do that, it shuts off another shipment of crude 
oil into the United States from the Middle East.
  But I would say grow the size of the energy pie. Change the size, the 
proportion of the pieces. Let us shrink this piece, 10.8 percent of 
crude oil. Let us shrink this piece of natural gas, but let us grow the 
supply of natural gas dramatically so we can afford to grow it if we 
need to and save our fertilizer industry, which is very close to have 
all been pushed out of the United States because we are unwilling to 
develop our natural gas supplies. So we put Hugo Chavez in a situation 
where he could potentially be controlling the food supply in the United 
States by controlling the fertilizer that is made down there out of the 
natural gas that they have. Now, thankfully, we have some U.S. 
companies that are set up in Trinidad, Tobago, and as long as that 
would remain stable, they will be able to supply us fertilizer there 
more reliably and more stably than they would have out of Venezuela.
  But then, as I said, expand the coal, expand the biodiesel, expand 
the geothermal. Expand the solar to the extent that it is economically 
feasible to do that. We are continuing to expand the wind. That is a 
renewable resource. And as our technology goes forward, we get a lot 
better return out of our capital investment there. This biomass, of 
course, is ethanol and biodiesel.
  The hydroelectricity, I would love to build a few more dams in 
America, but I just cannot see a way that we can crack that 
environmentalist nut at this point. But at least maintain this, expand 
it if we can, because that is a renewable resource. It is as clean as 
any energy that you get.
  Our nuclear capability, Mr. Speaker, it is amazing to me that it has 
been over 30 years, that I know of, that we have at least begun the 
construction on a new nuclear production facility in the United States. 
Those facilities are coming off line, and some of them are starting to 
reach the end of their life. We need to develop more nuclear energy, 
generate more electricity with nuclear. It is safe technology. It is 
the safest technology from a statistical basis than anything that we 
produce in America. You cannot generate electricity out of diesel fuel 
or natural gas or coal with as low an accident rate as you have out of 
the nuclear, Mr. Speaker. So I would say expand this percentage of 
nuclear.
  Reduce the natural gas for electrical energy, but expand it for 
fertilizer production so our food supply is up, and

[[Page H1904]]

that fertilizer production feeds the biomass. And when the biomass goes 
from corn and soy diesel and the other parts of the biomass that 
produces diesel fuel to the cellulosic version, which we are 5 to 6 
years away from becoming an effective means of producing ethanol, then 
our fertilizer supply out of natural gas becomes an essential component 
to our biomass up here. And one day not very far down the line, I want 
to see the size of this pie grow dramatically.
  And I will be putting together a formula for this, Mr. Speaker, as 
time goes by and bringing it to the floor of this House and advocating 
to the Members of this Congress how important it is for us to grow the 
size of the energy pie and to change the proportions of the pieces of 
this pie so that there is a future for the economy in America. We can 
do a lot of it with renewable fuels. And the efficiencies that we have 
provided there, another one that is false information that seems to 
come from other parts of the country is that we cannot get very much 
ethanol out of a bushel of corn. Well, I do not know anybody who is 
producing ethanol at least in Iowa today that is not getting 2\3/4\ 
gallons out of a bushel of corn, and that number is creeping up as our 
enzymes get better, our efficiency gets better. And we will be able to 
adapt to the cellulosic as well.
  This region that I have the profound honor and privilege to represent 
in the Upper Midwest is a region that when the pioneers came, they 
settled, they turn the sod over, and they set up their farms, and they 
raised livestock and row crop and hay, and they were in the business of 
raising food and fiber for America. And that is the case from Canada 
down to the gulf coast, coast to coast. The agriculture communities in 
America were always in the business of raising food and fiber.
  But today we are in the business of raising food, fiber, and energy, 
and I live in now an energy export center where 5 years ago there was 
not much sign of any of this energy production. When you drove along, 
if you saw some steam along the skyline, you would assume that it was 
smoke from a fire somewhere, and you would wonder why it had not been 
put out. Today you will see the vapors going up. Some people think it 
is smoke. It is the cleanest of water vapor coming out of the ethanol 
plants, and we recognize them on the horizon: Well, there is an ethanol 
plant there, there is one over there. And in between there are hundreds 
and hundreds of wind chargers sitting on the ridges.
  An energy export center in western Iowa, a place where we have never 
been able to drill a successful oil well, but it will not be long 
before we will be producing far more energy out of that region than we 
are getting out of some of the oil fields across the United States. In 
fact, today I believe we are producing a lot more energy out of ethanol 
and the biodiesel.
  Grow the size of the energy pie, Mr. Speaker. Do this for our economy 
and do this for America's security. And do so with the idea in mind 
that the places in the world where we are buying our oil are far too 
volatile for us to bet our economic future on.
  Now, I have another chart here that helps illustrate that. It is 
really not all of the countries that we purchase oil from, Mr. Speaker, 
but it tells us a few things. What I see missing on this chart are 
countries like Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the large oil-producing 
countries. But it tells us what is going on in Libya, 36 billion 
barrels of oil. And then here we are with ANWR at 10.4-, a third of the 
reserves of Libya. And some of the other countries here: The Congo, a 
small amount; Nigeria, a large supply, not that stable a place to be, 
but there is a lot of oil there, and I think their reserves might have 
been discovered some more since this chart was made.
  Here is the United States with a respectable reserve of oil, 21.9 
billion barrels. But we can add that to 10.4- here out of ANWR. It 
takes us up here in this stratosphere in the area of Libya. It does not 
take us into the levels of countries that are not on this chart, three, 
four, five countries that have more oil than this, and they are not 
listed here, Mr. Speaker. But what this tells us is if we go buy our 
oil from Nigeria, it is unstable, and we work for their stability.
  Australia's supplies are far lower than one might think, although 
there is more discovery going on there all along.
  Any of these other countries, Indonesia, Egypt, think about the 
stability. Brazil, for example, they do not have all that much.
  Kazakhstan is a pretty good friend to us. There is a pipeline now 
being put together from Kazakhstan and into China, and so a lot of that 
oil is going to go into China. There is the China reserves there, 18.3 
billion. And China is increasing their consumption of oil at a rate 
seven times the increase that we are here in the United States. So at 
the rate they are going, they will be the world's largest consumer of 
energy down the line somewhere.
  But I cannot find too many places along on this list where I think I 
would rather trust the future of the economy of America to them and the 
lack of stability there than I would trust the future of America to an 
energy-independent America.
  We can get there, Mr. Speaker. We need to work to get there, and we 
have the formula to do that. And many of the countries that we are 
purchasing oil from today are countries also that are working against 
our national interests. And Venezuela, for example, is taking an ever-
more-hostile position, teaming up with Fidel Castro. And the funding 
that is coming from that oil is helping to fund Castro and Cuba, and it 
is funding subversive activities all over South America. If we look at 
the activities that are going on there, the elections that have taken 
place, country after country has had an election or a power change that 
has shifted more towards Marxism, away from freedom. And China is 
involved in the Panama Canal. They are invested down there, and we also 
have Castro who is starting to drill for oil 45 miles offshore of Cuba. 
And if you remember, from the lowest part of Florida to Cuba, it is 90 
miles. So not having looked at the map, at least by those statistics, 
he has cut the distance to the United States in half, tapping into oil 
that we ought to be tapping into, at least very close to that same kind 
of region that is there.
  How come we cannot, Mr. Speaker, look at this overall picture and 
realize that if we only do a little bit at a time, if we only decide we 
are going to open up a little bit of the lease down there near the 
Panhandle of Florida and drill for a little natural gas down there 
because the pressure on the prices are so high that we have to act like 
we are doing something, so we let a bit of drilling come in. And that 
little bit of drilling is the equivalent of just taking the lid off the 
pressure cooker just for an instant. So the pressure goes down, but the 
heat is still on, and the pressure will increase again. If we take the 
lid off a little bit every time, it is not enough to affect the 
markets. It is not enough to affect the market to the point where we 
are going to see lower energy prices. So energy prices creep up. We 
only do this incrementally.
  We must be bold, Mr. Speaker. We must dramatically expand our ethanol 
production. We must dramatically expand our biodiesel production. 
America's farmers have stepped up to the plate with this. They are 
increasing their overall production of their grain. They have invested 
capital so that they can produce ethanol and produce biodiesel.
  Let me add one more thing to this misinformation that has been going 
on around America, that the reason that gas is high because we have 
ethanol requirements in some of the gas that have just come on 
recently, and that the high price of ethanol is the reason that gas has 
gone up by 50, 60, 70 cents a gallon or whatever that number might be.
  Let me point out that ethanol is 10 percent of a gallon of gasoline, 
and the spot market for ethanol, the highest I have seen is $2.50 a 
gallon. But you are only putting in 10 percent; so in 1 gallon of gas, 
there is only going to be 1/10 of that in there. So 1/10 of $2.50, you 
have to spread that across the whole gallon of gasoline is my point, 
Mr. Speaker. And it is not possible to take 1/10 of a gallon, add it to 
9/10 of a gallon, and raise the price anywhere near the extent that is 
being alleged.
  So it is not the price of ethanol that is driving up the price of 
gas, it is the instability in the world. It is the lack of building 
refineries. It is the lack of vision in an overall energy pie, Mr.

[[Page H1905]]

Speaker. And I urge strongly and powerfully for this Congress to step 
out boldly, grow the size of this energy pie, reduce the cost of 
energy, dramatically drive our economy, and take care of our security 
well into the future.

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