Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010--Conference Report

Floor Speech

ENERGY AND WATER DEVELOPMENT AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2010--CONFERENCE REPORT -- (Senate - October 14, 2009)

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Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I think I speak for myself and Senator Bennett, we very much appreciate the work the Senator from Oklahoma does. He does it diligently. He is on the floor a great deal pushing his views on these issues. On the specific issue that he just described, it is an issue in which he came to the floor and offered it. We included it in the bill during the Senate floor consideration because we believed in it. We agreed with him, as did others in the Senate, and that is what we took to conference.

The Senator from Oklahoma weaves a bit of a larger cloud than exists by suggesting there was some sort of deep secrets or conspiratorial approach to try to prevent the public from seeing something. That is far from the case. The Senator makes a point that we agreed with by accepting his amendment. That is, reports required of the Department of Energy to be sent to the Congress should be available not only to Congress but to the American people. We agreed with that point. That is why we put it in the Senate bill. We went to conference with the House. There was objection. The fact is, this is a very big piece of legislation. If we decided that if we can't resolve an objection or if we can't reach agreement on everything, then there won't be a conference report. If that were the case, there would be very few conference reports on the floor of the Senate.

As my colleagues from Oklahoma and Utah know, there is a lot of give and take in the conference process. This is a piece of legislation that has some $30 billion-plus on a wide range of issues such as nuclear weapons. This bill also funds nuclear weapons programs, water programs for both the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, energy programs, nuclear waste cleanup sites and many more complicated and important issues. In order to get a conference report, we had to give and take here and there, and there was an objection to the provision the Senator from Oklahoma had put in the Senate bill. I regret that, but that was the case. As my colleague from Utah described previously, I will continue to support the Senator from Oklahoma's efforts to make sure all of these reports are made available to the American people, providing that there is no national security issue or secret clearance to them.

I emphasize something my colleague from Oklahoma described about this. This conference report on energy and water is an important conference report. We need to get our bills done on time. Aside from the fact that it does not include his amendment, which we had previously supported and still do, we need to do our work. There is a lot of criticism about not passing appropriations bills. We will pass appropriations bills this year in great contrast to years previous when there have been big omnibus bills. That is a good thing, that we are making progress to pass individual appropriations bills. We brought this bill to the floor for debate. Amendments were offered, and the bill was passed. That is exactly the way the process should work.

Senator Bennett and I brought a bill to the floor that is slightly less than 1 percent above last year's expenditures for water and energy and so on. The Senator from Oklahoma acknowledged at the beginning of his remarks that
this bill, with respect to the fiscal year 2010, is not a bill that unnecessarily throws a lot of money at programs and projects. We are less than 1 percent above last year's expenditures. That is important to note.

With respect to the many programs in the bill, there are many that are flat funded. Some are even slightly below fiscal year 2009. The exception is in three areas where there were increases. The first area of increase was for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs because we are trying to make sure we move down the road more aggressively to attain a lower carbon future and promote greater efficiency. Second, the DOE's Science program represents an investment that will provide significant dividends in the future. Our great science laboratories and other investments in science represent a profoundly important investment in our nation. Finally, naval reactors had an increase. We put some additional money there because of the importance of this program. The rest of the programs are very near their fiscal year 2009 levels with no increase at all.

This is a good conference report. I don't believe it is inappropriate for my colleague from Oklahoma to be upset that his amendment is not a part of the report. I understand his position. He has served in the House and Senate. He understands there are many things in conference that get dropped. Yet, for everything that is dropped, there was someone in the House or Senate who believed it was important enough to come to the floor, offer it, fight for it, and passionately believe in it. I understand that is true with everything. It is certainly true for our colleague from Oklahoma who spends a lot of time pushing for increased transparency. We appreciate that. That is why we agreed to the amendment during the Senate debate.

This Energy and Water Appropriations bill is an important piece of legislation. It does not contain the one amendment the Senator from Oklahoma got put in the Senate side. We wish it did, but it does not. But the conference report is nonetheless something that merits the support of the broad membership in the Senate.

I yield the floor.

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Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, let me thank my colleagues who voted for cloture for the Energy and Water Appropriations conference report. It is important that we do the appropriations bills and get them done individually. We are now past October 1, but in the last 2 years, we actually had to do omnibus appropriations bills. Thanks to Senator Reid and his determination and thanks to Senator Inouye, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, we are doing the bills one by one by one, and we are going to get them finished. We just voted on the bill that funds all of the energy and water programs in the country, and it is a very important investment in this country.

I wanted to comment more generally about a few issues. The legislation we are moving, the conference report, just got cloture. We got it through the House and the Senate and now we are in a period of 30 hours post-cloture. Hopefully, we will then get it to the President for his signature for it to become law. The concerns I have about the issues here include not just the water infrastructure and nuclear weapons programs in our Energy and Water bill but also very much include energy.

I wish to speak for a moment about the energy challenges we face. This chart describes a very serious dilemma for our country. Two-thirds of the crude oil used in the United States today is imported. Two-thirds of the crude oil we use comes from other countries, some of whom don't like us very much. Our economy runs on energy. If, God forbid, tomorrow the supply of oil to this country were interrupted by terrorists or for some other reason, our economy would be in desperate trouble. Every single day the American people get up and use energy but take it for granted. We get out of bed, and we turn a switch on. We assume the lights will be on. We perhaps plug in an electric razor or toothbrush and expect there to be electricity to run that razor or toothbrush. We take a shower and expect the water heater to have been heated with electricity or natural gas to provide the hot water for a shower. Then we make coffee and breakfast, and there is electricity assumed to be available. Further, we put a key in the ignition of a vehicle and drive off to work, using energy once again.

Every part of our daily life is filled with the use of energy. The question is, How can we address this issue of our unbelievable reliance on foreign oil? It threatens our national security and our energy security to be so reliant on foreign oil. The reliance we have has to be reduced. So how do we do that? Even as we do that, we must also find a way to reduce the carbon footprint and reduce the amount of CO2 that goes into the atmosphere to protect the planet. So two things are working at the same time.

I wish to talk for a bit more about the legislation we have finished in the Senate Energy Committee, rather than the Energy and Water Appropriations panel which I chair. Senator Bingaman chairs the Energy Committee, and I am the second ranking Democrat on that authorizing committee. I wish to talk about what we have written in the energy authorizing bill in the context with efforts that some have described to merge that energy bill with a cap-and-trade climate change bill and bring both to the floor for a debate. I prefer we not do that approach. Not because I don't think we should address climate change; I believe we should have that debate too. I believe we are going to have to have a lower carbon future. What I believe we should do is a two-step process that focuses on energy legislation. From a policy standpoint, it would give us a real opportunity to reduce carbon in the atmosphere by changing our energy mix. First by using more renewable energy, and second by finding ways, through greater investments in research and technology, to reduce the carbon emitted when we burn fossil fuels to produce energy. So I have a couple of comments about this two-step approach.

The Energy bill we have enacted provides a lot of things. It provides a substantial increase in renewable energy, and it does that through wind turbines which create electricity from the wind. There is no carbon output with wind energy. The problem is that we have a lot of wind in remote areas, and we need to move it to the load centers that need the electricity. It's well known that there is wind from Texas to North Dakota. By the way, North Dakota ranks No. 1 in wind; we are the Saudi Arabia in wind. We also have a substantial opportunity to develop solar from Texas across the Southwest to California where the sun shines all the time, or virtually all the time. We can maximize the production of energy where it is available from wind, solar, biomass and so on, and then we can build the transmission capability to move it to the load centers that need it. By doing this, you will dramatically change our energy capability in this country.

The legislation we have done in the Energy Committee accomplishes that goal. We have a significant transmission piece in that legislation that allows us, at long last, to build the transmission capacity we need to support our renewable potential.

We built an Interstate Highway System around this country so you can get in a vehicle and drive almost anywhere, but we have not built an interstate highway of transmission to move energy from where it exists to where it is needed. We have a patchwork of transmission that was built up over a period of time when there was a local utility that produced energy for a certain market and then in that area distributed energy to its market. That is the kind of transmission system we have. We need to dramatically modernize the transmission so we can maximize the amount of renewable energy.

There are a lot of things happening that I think are exciting in energy that can change our future. Do you know right now there are a couple hundred people working on a process to find innovative ways to use coal. Dr. Craig Venter is involved. He is one of the great scientists in our country and one of the two people who led the human genome project. They are working on finding ways to create synthetic microbes that would actually consume a coal in deep seams and turn the coal into methane. Think of that. It creates synthetic microbes that will essentially eat the coal--that is not a scientific term--they will consume the coal and leave in its wake methane, turning coal into methane.

We have others who are working on the development of algae and energy, and Dr. Venter is involved in this as well. By the way, after 15 years of it being discontinued, I restarted the algae research at the DOE energy laboratories through my Energy and Water Subcommittee. Dr. Venter is working on developing strains of algae that will excrete lipids that become a fuel. We know we can grow algae in water and sunlight and CO2 and then get rid of CO2 by growing algae and then destroy the algae by harvesting it and creating diesel fuel. Dr. Venter is looking at ways to produce algae that simply excrete the lipids and, with little transformation, becomes a fuel. We have so many things going on that are so interesting. I think 10 years from now we will look in the rearview mirror and see dramatic changes in how we produce energy and how we significantly reduce carbon.

I wish to show a map of my State in which we have some projects that are extraordinary. The western half of North Dakota has substantial oil development. The USGS determined that it was the largest discovery of technically recoverable oil that has yet been assessed in the lower 48 States. They estimated that there was as much as 4.3 billion barrels of oil in this region known as the Bakken formation. We also have a substantial amount of coal, lignite coal. We have one of the largest commercial working example of CO2 sequestration by capturing the CO2 from a synthetic gas plant, putting it in a pipeline, and sending it up to Saskatchewan where they inject it underground for enhanced oil recovery. By doing this, it improves the productivity of marginal oil wells in Saskatchewan. So we actually capture the CO2 from the North Dakota plant that is gasifying coal and gas, ship it up to Canada, and then inject it underground in an enhanced oil recovery process. In my judgment, that is a very exciting thing.

Here are the fuels we use for the production of electricity. About forty-eight percent of our electricity comes from coal. Nuclear provides a smaller piece than that need. We have natural gas, hydroelectric, and other renewables too. So my point is we are not going to have a future without using coal for some period of time. The question is how do we use it in a different way. I believe a substantial investment in technology that will allow us to build near-zero emission coal-fired plants. I believe we can do that by capturing carbon and protecting our environment. We must maximize the use of renewables from wind, solar, biomass, and other sources. We must also move toward an electric drive transportation system, and then continue to invest in a longer term hydrogen fuel cell system. We need to do all of these things are what we can and should do.

The Energy bill we passed out of the Energy Committee is a giant step forward to maximize renewables and increase energy efficiency as a way to reduce carbon. I think what we ought to do is bring that energy bill to the floor, have a debate, get it to the President for his signature. This would be a giant step in the direction of climate change. Following that, we should bring the climate change bill to the floor and then address the issue of targets and timetables and other mechanisms to find out what is achievable for protecting this country. Some have heard me speak about this and have said, Well, he doesn't support any sort of climate change legislation. What I have said is I don't support cap and ``trade.'' At this point, I have said I don't support providing a $1 trillion carbon securities market for Wall Street so that speculators and the investment banks can trade carbon securities tomorrow and tell us what our price of energy is going to be for us the next day. I have precious little faith in those same people who ran up the price of oil last year to $147 a barrel in day trading when the market fundamentals showed that demand was down and supply was up. So, no, I don't support the trade side using that mechanism, but I do support creating climate change legislation that has appropriate targets and timetables that reduce our nation's carbon footprint. We can do that. We will do that. I think there is general consensus we should do that.

All I am saying is this: What we ought to do is bring to the floor energy legislation that will adopt the policies on maximizing renewables, building the transmission capability, creating the building efficiencies and much more that is and important step forward and the lowest hanging fruit in energy. Among these positive benefits, energy efficiency is the lowest hanging fruit by far that costs the least to retrofit America's buildings and homes. We should do all of that in the Energy bill that has now been waiting for some months. I have spoken to the majority leader who has been a terrific advocate for sound and thoughtful energy policies. I have also talked to the President directly about this. It is not that I don't want to do climate change because I know my colleagues are working hard on it. It is the fact that I want to make progress in energy policy first that can change our fuel mix and develop a lower carbon future. Because we have done that work in the Energy Committee, we have taken an important step. We can then bring a climate change bill to the floor after that which I know is controversial, but that
we can work on developing targets and timetables for that lower carbon future. I think this is something we should do and I think we can do. I think it would, in my judgment, be the best fit for this country's future energy policy and for the policy that is necessary to lower the future CO2 emissions into the atmosphere and protect the environment.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida is recognized.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that any recess adjournment or morning business period count past cloture.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak for up to 10 minutes.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I say to my colleague from North Dakota that the one example he gave about algae--it is so exciting that we know now that you can take algae and put it in some kind of plastic cylinder, expose it to sunlight, and with the right ingredients in there, pump in CO2, and it consumes the carbon dioxide and in the process it makes ethanol. So as the Senator has hinted, if this process ends up working, and working efficiently, what about putting an algae ethanol-producing plant right next to a coal-fired electricity plant to take the CO2 out of the coal, and instead of trying to inject it into the ground, put it right into the ethanol-producing algae plant? There are limitless possibilities, as the Senator from North Dakota pointed out. I find it quite exciting.

Mr. DORGAN. If the Senator will yield for a question, I held a hearing on the beneficial use of carbon. A scientist at Sandia National Laboratory said: Think of carbon not just as a problem but an opportunity.

In this case, when you talk of algae, it is single-cell pond scum, a green slime you find on top of wastewater, right? The fact is, you can feed CO2 to algae and produce something from it that extends our fuel supply. It is exactly the kind of thing that makes sense.

There are other beneficial uses of carbon as well. If we change our way of thinking a bit, we all have the same goal, which is to protect our planet. We can find other ways of maximizing the use of renewables and to reduce carbon by using it for enhanced oil recovery and producing additional fuel by growing algae.

I thank the Senator.

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