[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 143 (Wednesday, September 10, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H7994-H7995]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                 ENERGY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, there are a number of points I want to talk 
about tonight on energy. But first I want to say that sometimes people 
get the feeling that we Republicans refer to alternative energy as 
something that's kind of window dressing because all we want to do is 
drill.
  I have been working with alternative energy issues for over a decade 
here in Congress. In my district we now have the largest integrated soy 
diesel plant in the world that Dreyfus has put near Claypool just 
outside of Warsaw, Indiana. I recently gave an award that I have, a 
Johnny Appleseed award, who's actually a real person buried in Ft. 
Wayne, to a local company, Sweetwater Music, which is the greatest 
online music company in the United States and in the world because it 
looks like they are going to be certified as the first gold business 
building in the State of Indiana, at full green standards, first gold 
higher than platinum. And they're doing it and they did it in a way and 
the reason I wanted to highlight them is they can pay for the cost of 
their building with what they've saved in energy. I mean it pays for 
itself. A green building does not have to be a drawback.
  At the same time, Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center done by 
Goshen College also has a platinum standard building. I believe that 
the wind power is a real alternative. Parker-Hannifin in New Haven, 
Indiana, I have an earmark set aside to help them with their project. 
They do coolant systems, and they believe they can get 20 to 40 percent 
more energy out of each wind turbine by changing the coolant standards. 
I have worked with solar energy in my district. Water Furnace, a 
company just highlighted in the New York Times in the last week, by 
recycling water for heating and cooling, can save an untold number of 
power plants in the United States if we do that. Nevertheless, 
representing the number one manufacturing district in the United 
States.
  Let me just say this: We need coal, nuclear, and drilling as well as 
all these alternative energies. I have the largest pickup plant in the 
world that does the Silverado and the Sierra. You aren't going to power 
this if we don't have enough oil and gas. I have two huge SDI steel 
plants that take more energy to make the steel than cities of probably 
75,000 to 100,000, possibly even double that, to 200,000, and 
everything in those cities to power those steel plants. Five new core 
facilities. Valbruna Steel. We aren't going to do this with a windmill 
standing up. Those are supplemental power systems.
  But if we're not going to have every company moving to China, we have 
to have more energy in this country. The motor homes are not going to 
be powered by a little solar panel. And they're getting hammered right 
now, and 58 percent are in my district. The international trucks are 
not going to be

[[Page H7995]]

powered by alternative energy. We need basic energy.
  And I want to talk specifically tonight about one. We hear about 
shale oil. This is what it looks like: layers of rock, and then there 
is a layer that has hydrocarbons that are packed in much like other oil 
that are in a solid piece like this. This basically is the equivalent 
of a gold nugget in the gold area because you can see here it is a 
piece of basically oil that by heating technology, this turns into high 
grade oil. We have 800 billion barrels of this. We pump right now in 
the United States 20 million. We have 800 billion in just the west 
Colorado, southwest Wyoming, and Utah basin. This is not the Rocky 
Mountains. It's not by the Grand Tetons. It's not by the Rocky Mountain 
National Park. It's in the big basin in between the mountains because 
that's where you have the foliage and things that are packed together 
to do this.
  Now, you can do it in open-pit mining like tar sands, and that's what 
you see a lot in the news. But the Mahogany Research Project that Shell 
Oil has, and you can find it on the Internet because they have now gone 
public for a reason I will mention in a minute, and Chevron have ways 
to do this in the ground so you don't have open-pit mining. They've 
already extracted enough in their pilot projects that we were able to 
use it in our planes. We don't need oil at $120. Obviously at $40 it 
isn't profitable. But in between there we have a lot of room to work to 
get this out of the ground.
  The reason they have gone public, because they were nearing the point 
of a larger scale project, the House of Representatives and the Senate 
banned shale oil drilling. The project has stopped cold. They have laid 
off the engineers. Chevron and Shell have had to stop. One project has 
gone ahead on the open-pit mining. But the new stories in Colorado--
this is a huge debate right now. Just about a month ago I went out. 
They have now opened it so Members of Congress can see it because they 
were trying to keep this technology from each other and the different 
companies, but basically Shell and Chevron have gone public with this 
technology because they were about to make it public. But we banned it, 
800 billion barrels in the United States that does not have open-pit 
mining, that in the one experimental that they did already, they have 
already done the recovery of. It's intense when they do it, but down in 
the ground, they basically freeze the area around it, as you can see in 
the Mahogany Project, and get it out.
  If we're going to keep industry in America, we have to come up with 
American energy strategies. Do everything, including shale oil.

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