[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 90 (Wednesday, June 6, 2007)]
[House]
[Page H6079]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             OIL PRODUCTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, everybody in America is concerned 
about gas and oil prices. We all remember the long gas lines during the 
Carter administration, and the government made a commitment that we 
would be independent as far as energy needs were concerned at some 
point in the not too distant future, and we were supposed to work 
toward that end. I would like to give a report on where we stand 
because the American people are very, very concerned about high gas 
prices right now and the lack of oil.
  On May 29, the United States consumed as much oil as it will produce 
domestically all year. All the oil that we produce in the United States 
has been used up by May 29. That means from that date until January, 
2008, next year, we are now completely dependent upon politically 
unstable regions of the world such as the Persian Gulf, Nigeria, and 
Venezuela for our energy needs. Why is that? Because year after year, 
decade after decade, this country throws up more roadblocks, usually 
because of some environmental reason, to exploring for and utilizing 
domestic supplies of oil and natural gas.
  In the ANWR, for instance, it holds the single largest deposit of oil 
in the entire United States, and that is 10.4 billion barrels of oil, 
and it is more than double the proven reserves in the entire State of 
Texas, and almost half of the total proven reserves in the United 
States, which is 22 billion barrels.
  To put it more simply, opening the ANWR could increase U.S. reserves 
by nearly 50 percent.
  And I have been up to the ANWR, and I can tell you there is no 
environmental damage that is going to take place if we drill in that 
area. And we could get between 1\1/2\ to 2 million barrels of oil a 
day. That would help a tremendous amount the needs of the American 
people.
  On the outer continental shelf, another example, as required by the 
Energy Policy Act of 2005, the Department of the Interior recently 
conducted a comprehensive inventory of oil and natural gas resources 
located off of our coastlines. According to the Department of Interior, 
there is an estimated 8.5 billion barrels of known oil reserves and 
29.3 trillion cubic feet of known natural gas reserves along our 
coastlines; with 82 percent of the oil and 95 percent of the gas 
located in the Gulf of Mexico.
  However, even more importantly, the Department of the Interior 
estimates there are untapped resources of about 86 billion barrels, 51 
percent in the Gulf of Mexico; and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural 
gas, 55 percent in the Gulf of Mexico, that is out there.
  In July, 2004, a Spanish oil company, Repsol-YPF, in partnership with 
communist Cuba's state oil company, CUPET, identified five oil fields 
it classified as ``high quality'' in the deep water of the Florida 
Straits right off the coast of Florida, 20 miles northeast of Havana 
and within Cuba's Exclusive Economic Zone.
  According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the North Cuba Basin holds 
an estimated 4.6 billion to 9.3 billion barrels of crude oil and 9.8 
trillion to 21.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
  Unfortunately, since the 1980s, the U.S. has prohibited oil and gas 
drilling on most of the outer continental shelf except for limited 
areas of the western Gulf of Mexico, not the Florida Straits or around 
Florida, and limited parts of Alaska.
  Oil shale: There is enough oil shale in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming 
to create the equivalent of 1.8 trillion barrels of oil and potentially 
as much as 8 trillion barrels of oil. In comparison, Saudi Arabia 
reportedly holds proven reserves of 267 billion barrels, which is less 
than about one-eighth of what we have in the United States in shale.
  Unfortunately, oil shale is roughly equivalent to diesel fuel and a 
number of Clean Air Act regulations, such as low-sulphur diesel, and 
Federal motor fuel taxes, which favor gasoline over diesel fuels, have 
created a strong financial disincentive regarding the production and 
use of oil shale fuels.
  I don't want to belabor this point, but we have enough oil that we 
could move very closely to energy independence if we didn't have 
environmental radicals stopping us from drilling where we have the oil 
and we have those known oil reserves.
  It is tragic that we have to continue to rely on Saudi Arabia, 
Venezuela, and other countries that are very unstable in various parts 
of the world when we really know that at some point in the future we 
are going to need more and more of their oil.
  We need to move toward energy independence. We have been talking 
about it since the 1980s. Nothing has been done, and now gas prices are 
going up because we aren't producing enough oil and gas in the United 
States. And we have the reserves there to do it. We haven't even built 
any new oil refineries for 30 years. We can't even refine the oil that 
we do get here in the United States to take care of all the needs of 
the American people.
  So I would just like to say to my colleagues, as I close, on both 
sides of the aisle, that we need to start moving toward energy 
independence. We need to start thinking about economic concerns as well 
as environmental concerns and have a balance there. We can do it in an 
environmentally safe way, and the American people want us to do it, and 
we need to listen to them as well as the environment lobby here in 
Congress.

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