[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 6]
[House]
[Page 7588]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 MOVING FORWARD TO A NEW ENERGY FUTURE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Washington (Mr. Inslee) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, last week I had two very exciting meetings 
with people who have some insights about how we can move forward to use 
a new energy future to really revive our economy, and I thought I would 
take a couple of moments to advise my colleagues about these meetings. 
I thought they would be interested in them.
  First, I met some absolutely brilliant people up in Boston area at 
the MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Energy Club. This is a 
club of graduate and post-graduate students who have come together to 
organize themselves to try to promote ideas about how to build a new, 
clean energy future for the country.
  These are brilliant people, post-graduates in chemistry, electrical 
engineering, mechanical engineering. These are really some of the creme 
de la creme of our young geniuses coming up who can help build our new 
economy. It was fascinating to me, because these were people who were 
tremendously optimistic even in these tough times about the ability to 
grow the U.S. economy, if we will get serious about promoting the 
future of new energy technologies.

                              {time}  1100

  I am convinced after meeting these relatively young people that we've 
got a bright future in our economy if we can unleash these intellectual 
geniuses. They told me that they were waiting for a signal from 
Washington, DC, that we were really going to embrace these new 
technologies; and they told me about some of these new technologies 
that they're fascinated in. I thought I would share some of them today.
  They told me about a technology company called Ramgen, a company out 
in my State of Washington, that has an ability to compress carbon 
dioxide so that someday we might be able to burn coal in a way that 
carbon dioxide doesn't go into the air but we compress that carbon 
dioxide and put it under the ground permanently so it doesn't cause 
global warming. They're waiting for Congress to pass a bill that will 
essentially direct the economy in that direction. They told me it's 
very important to have a bill that will create a fund to be able to 
support the research so that these people at MIT can help develop this 
and various other technologies. The cap-and-trade bill, which I'll talk 
about a little later, is a bill that will do just that, to help that 
technology forward.
  We talked about the Ausra Company, a company that just opened the 
first manufacturing plant in the United States, commercial plant, for 
concentrated solar energy, so you can concentrate the sun's rays and 
generate electricity. They are now hiring several hundred people in 
Nevada, building these new plants, so that we can convert the sun's 
energy directly to electricity, and they were very excited about that 
technology.
  I met up there the leader of A123 Battery Company. At A123 Battery, 
they make lithium ion batteries that can power plug-in hybrid cars and 
ultimately all electric cars using lithium ion. The beauty of this, of 
course, is that if you use electricity, you don't have to import 
gasoline from Saudi Arabia, you don't have to wrap yourself around that 
national security threat, and you can use electricity rather than oil. 
But they told me they're waiting for a signal from Congress to move 
toward electricity in our cars. Now we started that in the stimulus 
bill to help them, but now we need to move forward to have a bill to 
essentially regulate carbon dioxide so we can have another signal to 
industry to start moving to electric cars.
  We talked about a company called the Sapphire Energy Company. The 
Sapphire Energy Company just started construction of ponds--and this 
will sound like science fiction but it's real--ponds where you can grow 
algae and the algae takes the sun's energy and turns it into lipids and 
then you essentially press it and you get fuel that you make gasoline 
out of. So we can use algae to essentially eat carbon dioxide out of 
our coal-fired plants and then use it to make a liquid automobile fuel 
that's chemically indistinguishable for gasoline. Pretty exciting 
company.
  We talked about the AltaRock Company. The AltaRock Company is a 
company, again up in the State of Washington, which is trying to 
commercialize what we call engineered geothermal, where you can poke a 
hole down in the Earth, you pump water down there, it collects to a 
300-degree temperature, you bring it up, generate steam and make 
electricity. Again, zero CO2.
  These companies are waiting for a signal from Congress, the cap-and- 
trade bill, and we're going to try and get it through this year.

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