American Energy Independence
AMERICAN ENERGY INDEPENDENCE -- (House of Representatives - June 05, 2008)
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Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentleman from Utah, my good friend, for his wise words on innovation. I think we are going to be forced into innovation. That is good. But I will have to say the current prices of driving a vehicle and heating a home this year in my rural district are going to be prohibitive for some people being able to handle it.
Their budgets are not prepared for the prices. Because as we have felt the oil prices, natural gas only increased marginally last year, but today the price for natural gas out of the ground is $12 and 40-some cents. Last year at this time, it was between $6 and $7. We are approaching a doubling of natural gas prices.
At this time of the year, we don't use a lot of natural gas because we are not cooling much and we are not heating hardly anything. So we have surplus. We are using it for industrial purposes, which is big, and to generate electricity and to run our plants, but we are not using it at the home as much. So this is the time of year we normally put it in the ground.
Last year, we were putting $6 and $7 gas in the ground. This year, it's currently, in the last few months, $11, now $12 gas, and seems to be going up a few pennies every day. So we don't know where that is headed. But the fear is we have a storm in the Gulf, which always interrupts supply, we could have $15, $16
gas, and that would make home heating almost impossible next winter.
Just to share with you, as he was talking about innovation and change, I come from Titusville, Pennsylvania. I live in the little town of Pleasantville, Pennsylvania, 5 miles from there. But I was born 1 mile from Drakes Well, the first oil well in the world. It was drilled in 1859. And I vividly remember as a young boy, down the Oil Creek Valley, a stream called Oil Creek because it always had oil on it because the way oil perked its way out of the ground naturally. So there was oil on that stream.
And when we had the rush of oil, those hills were naked. There was no vegetation. The trees were gone. But today, it's almost like a virgin, beautiful oak-cherry forest. And the streams there, Oil Creek naturally produces both trout and bass, which is not very common. And the brooky trout streams flow into it all the way down. It's a beautiful, pristine area. And nobody did anything. They just left nature purify it. So oil is not the horrible thing. It's a hydrocarbon. It went back to dirt. The trees grew and the streams are pure and wildlife is very abundant.
Now I guess what we want to talk about is production. How did we get to $125 to $135 oil and how did we get to this tremendous price on natural gas? Many years ago, we had a legislative moratorium to lock up the Outer Continental Shelf. Now back then natural gas was $2, oil was $10, and many argued that we shouldn't use ours, we ought to use theirs. Whether that was a wise argument or not, I won't say, but they have won and it has been locked up ever since.
In the early nineties, President Bush I put a Presidential moratorium on top of the legislative moratorium. Now what is a moratorium. The Continental Shelf is from 3 miles offshore. The States control the first 3 miles. Then the Federal Government, we the taxpayers, own the next 200 miles. That is considered our Continental Shelf. And most every country in the world, in fact, every country in the world produces there. Canada produces right above Maine. Canada produces right above the State of Washington, Great Britain produces on their continental shelf; Norway, Sweden, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia. It's just common practice. In fact, everybody gives Brazil great credit for being energy independent, and they give credit for ethanol. Well, ethanol is 15 percent of their energy use. The rest of it, they opened up their Outer Continental Shelf, had a big find out there, and they are now self-sufficient. They don't have to buy from anybody. Wouldn't it be great if America would be self-sufficient?
I think we have a lot more oil than was anticipated in this country. I know we have a lot of natural gas. We are currently importing 17 percent of our natural gas. We wouldn't even have to do that. We get 15 percent from Canada and we get 2 percent from LNG, which is from foreign countries similar to where we buy oil.
So we have locked ours up. Now what does that do? Well, we have locked it up and so we have taken our supply off the market. Now what is this Congress doing to react to that? Two or three weeks ago, we passed a bill, very thoughtful bill. We said, We are going to figure out a way to bring OPEC into court. We are going to bring OPEC to court. We are going to force them to produce for energy so we have more petroleum. Currently, we import 66 percent of our petroleum, about half from that area of the world and about half from Canada and Mexico. So we are going to force them because they are not producing enough. I think Saudi Arabia produces 12 million, I think another one, 7 million; another one, 6 million; another one, 5 million. But someone has determined that is not enough so we are going to have to bring them into court.
Now how you take someone to court for not producing enough oil when we've locked up our Outer Continental Shelf, we've locked up most of Alaska, we've locked up most of the Midwest, now how a country can think that we can sue our neighbors for not selling us enough oil when we have refused to produce our own doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
My taxpayers back home laugh at that when they hear the debate, but it's not funny. But we actually passed a bill to do that, as if it would make a difference. And I don't know what court we would bring it into.
Let's look at our energy use today. We are about 40 percent petroleum, 23 percent natural gas, 23 percent coal, 8 percent nuclear, 2.7 hydro, 2.4 biomass. And this is the one people have not paid a lot of attention to. This is woody biomass. This one has grown measurably in the last few years. Eight hundred thousand Americans use a wood pellet stove today to heat their homes, and that is sawdust compressed. All our dry kilns in the country where we dry our wood uses wood sawdust to heat those rather than buy propane or fuel oil. A lot of factories in the rural areas are using wood waste also.
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