[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 10]
[House]
[Page 13419]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    BATTLING OIL AND GAS POWER PLAYS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Massachusetts (Mr. Olver) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. OLVER. Madam Speaker, we are witnessing the mother of all oil and 
gas power plays in this country. Big Oil and their allies are 
desperately trying to open every possible site for oil drilling before 
the Texas oil men, Bush and Cheney, leave the White House in January.
  Under the Bush-Cheney-McCain plan, were it to become law, every acre 
of the Outer Continental Shelf, 50 to 200 miles offshore, and all of 
our coastline would be open to leasing and drilling. You can bet your 
home that the most promising areas for oil production would be fully 
leased at the foolish, long-term, low-price policy now in effect, but 
that's all. There's no certainty that the newly leased areas would be 
producing a drop of oil 10 years out. Big Oil could simply bank their 
cheap long-term leases until the price of oil reaches $200 or even $500 
per barrel. And we, the Congress and country, would be over the barrel. 
That, after all, has been the history.
  The claim has been made that opening the Outer Continental Shelf 
would unlock 86 billion barrels of known estimated reserves. Eighty-six 
billion barrels, by the way, would provide a dozen years of America's 
oil without using any foreign oil at all, but our Minerals Management 
Service estimates that 80 percent of those reserves lie in areas 
already open for leasing and for drilling. So the big oil companies 
have already leased large areas that have the greatest potential for 
high production, and yet they're producing on less than one quarter of 
the already leased acreage. Ironically, that may be the best policy for 
the U.S. because America's problem is huge.
  Our less than 5 percent of the planet's population consumes almost 25 
percent of the oil produced in the world. We are so dependent on oil 
that we have limited leverage to reduce demand, but we have only 3 
percent of the known oil reserves on the planet, and therefore, have 
very little leverage to increase the supply. Because exploration has 
been more thorough and extensive on our land and in our sovereign 
waters, the oil yet to be discovered on this planet lies not just 
predominantly but overwhelmingly beyond U.S. sovereignty.
  The Bush-McCain solution is doomed to failure because, first, opening 
more land and waters to leasing will not necessarily lead to 
production. Second, even if it did, the production under the best 
circumstances of shallow waters and of easy drilling and infrastructure 
in place would take 5 and, more typically, 10 years to produce. Third, 
if we were foolish enough to pursue that policy, we would use all of 
our oil, economically recoverable, in about 20 years and would be 
totally at the mercy of unfriendly oil producers.
  For America, the only certain solution to the high price of gasoline 
is to reduce the consumption of gasoline. Many of the big ways to do 
that require time to achieve, things like developing and switching to 
renewable energy, the research and development of fuel cell vehicles, 
living closer to work, building more extensive public transportation 
systems, replacing the whole vehicle fleet--both cars and trucks--with 
high fuel efficiency vehicles.
  There are immediate ways we can cut the speculation now. We can drive 
slower. We can drive less. We can carpool. We can use public 
transportation when it's possible. We can develop ``work from home'' 
wherever and whenever that's feasible as an option, and we need to 
start doing all of those immediate ways immediately.

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