[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 5]
[House]
[Page 6831]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        U.S. LEADS WORLD IN COAL

  (Mr. SHIMKUS asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. SHIMKUS. Mr. Speaker, the problem we have is our reliance on 
imported crude oil. The way we try to address this solution is through 
renewable fuels, conservation, additional exploration and new 
technologies. I want to talk about one of those new technologies today, 
which is coal-to-liquid application, called Btu conversion.
  Imagine this: a coal mine in the Midwest, on top of which sits a 
refinery, a liquid fuel refinery. Sound far fetched? Well, this 
technology has been around for 50 years. The Germans used it in World 
War II.
  The refinery bill that we have on the floor of the House today will 
provide the same incentives to expansion of petroleum refineries to 
coal-to-liquid applications.
  Mr. Speaker, the U.S. has 27 percent of the world coal supply, the 
largest of any country, but less than 2 percent of the world's oil and 
less than 3 percent of the world's natural gas. For a forceful response 
to the energy challenge, the U.S. must make much greater use of its 
unrivaled coal reserves.

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