[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 105 (Tuesday, June 24, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H5868-H5869]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      AMERICAN ENERGY INDEPENDENCE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. I agree with the gentleman. We should be doing more 
drilling in the United States. The oil companies should begin to 
develop the 6,391 offshore leases they already have that are 
environmentally approved, that are sitting idle, but the industry is 
not moving to develop those leases despite the vast resources 
available. In fact,

[[Page H5869]]

the estimates of the Minerals Management Service are that they could 
access 80 percent of the available oil off the shores of the United 
States of America from their existing leases. They just don't want to 
do it. Now, why might that be?
  Well, maybe it has something to do with their making piles of money 
the way it is. So why would they want to provide relief to the American 
consumer by cutting into their obscene profits?
  Second, there's some pressure on that side to open up the Arctic 
National Wildlife Refuge. There may be a fair amount of oil under 
there. We don't really know. There was one exploratory well drilled 30-
some-odd years ago. Proprietary. No one knows. But we do know that 
right next-door to the west of the pipeline is a vast area that used to 
be called the Naval Petroleum Reserve. Why was it called that? Because 
we know there is a huge amount of oil under there. We've known that for 
70 years. In fact, Bill Clinton, as President, decided to lease that to 
the industry to bring on line over 10 billion barrels of oil, of U.S. 
oil, for the American people.
  Now, first, of course, we have to do away with the little loophole 
the Republicans created when they allowed the ban on the export of 
Alaska oil to lapse. I have a bill, and I've had a bill for a number of 
years to reinstate a bill on the ban of the export of Alaska oil.
  But how about that known 10-billion-barrel reserve? The oil industry 
has drilled 25 exploratory wells and then has capped them, and they 
have no plans to provide transit from there to the existing pipeline, 
which is just to the east of that reserve.
  So how about the industry takes some of the 20-30 billion barrels 
that are available off of their existing leases that could double our 
domestic supply for the next 20 years and then develop that? Then we 
can talk about more leases or, hopefully, by then, we will have 
transited into a new energy future that isn't going to require the same 
massive amounts of oil that the current economy requires.
  There is something else the Republicans have left out. Had we started 
down a new energy path after 9/11, the lesson there would have been we 
don't want to be dependent upon the Middle East and Saudi Arabia. Most 
of those were Saudis who attacked us.
  Who's giving hundreds of billions of dollars a year to the Saudis? 
Well, unfortunately, American consumers are, and we're dependent upon 
them, and the President goes over and begs for oil. Even though they're 
violating international law, he won't file complaints against them. We 
treat them with kid gloves. We need to be free of those people, so we 
need to be looking toward a different energy future, but in the short 
term, we don't need to be price-gouged, which brings up a third point 
which the Republicans don't want to address.
  It's estimated that 50 cents of every gallon today is pure 
speculation for Wall Street. We could do away with that by closing the 
Enron loophole. Remember Ken-Boy Lay, the President's principal 
financier throughout his political career? He's dead now. Ken-Boy ran 
Enron. He wrote our energy policy behind closed doors with Dick Cheney. 
Enron is bankrupt, but the Enron loophole lives on, and other major 
firms on Wall Street--Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and others--are now 
fully utilizing that loophole.
  According to today's Washington Times, 99 percent of the premium 
crude in America is controlled not by ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and others 
but by Wall Street and futures speculation. They're making a pile of 
money at the cost to American consumers. So let's close that loophole. 
But, no, the Republicans never want to take on Big Oil and make them do 
what they should do, which is to develop existing leases which they're 
sitting on, and they don't want to take on Wall Street and close the 
loophole that was created for Enron's Ken-Boy Lay, the President's best 
buddy.
  Those are things we could do to provide short-term relief of, 
virtually immediately, 50 cents a gallon. Then in the medium and short 
term, by developing the 6,391 offshore oil leases and the former Naval 
Petroleum Reserve, with known reserves of over 10 billion barrels, we 
could make them develop that. Use it or lose it.
  I think we're going to have a discussion about that later this week. 
Let's see where the Republicans come down on that. These are already 
let leases, and they can be developed much more quickly than new leases 
could be. Let's see what they're really all about.

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