Hearing of the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources - Infrastructure, Transportation, Research and Innovation

Hearing

Today, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee meets to hold the first of three forumsroundtables actually- that focus on natural gas. Anything and everything is on the table at these
discussions if it advantages America's economy and its environmental needs.

Right now, natural gas is a strategic American asset. Right now we've got it and the rest of the world
wants it. It is the cleanest of the fossil fuels so our goal here is to find ways to lock-in the advantages of
the natural gas boom for a generation. I believe the best way to do that is to find creative answers to the
difficult questions that otherwise might throw a monkey wrench into the American engine of potential
progress. That includes demonstrating to concerned communities that gas production can be done
safely and help shrink America's carbon footprint while it helps grow more job-paying opportunities for
our people.

Now, after we scheduled this session my usual partner in my search for bipartisan approaches, Senator
Murkowski, was needed to accompany the Secretary of State to the meeting of the Arctic Council
Ministerial Session in Sweden, but we're very fortunate to have Senator Barrasso here and so we will be
the bipartisan tandem when this program begins. When Senator Murkowski returns, you will hear her
repeat as the two of us have done many times over the last several months that we come to these
forums without any preconceived plans for what comes from these sessions. There is no preconceived
plan, no piece of legislation that is going to be sprung on the unsuspecting at the conclusion of these, it
isn't going to be about Kabuki theater. The point of these roundtables is to allow for freer discussion in a
less structured environment in hopes that we can all learn from each other and promote cooperation
across the political spectrum.

In addition, I want to make one note after studying your statements, and they were very helpful on that
late plane last night from the West, we're up against a very challenging budget environment in this era
of sequestration. So programs and what we call incentives in effect are facing reductions not
expansions. So we are going to have to be particularly creative and nimble to figure out how to move
the machinery of the federal government around so as to promote some of the attractive and
interesting ideas that you are promoting today. Now I just want to touch very briefly on a couple of the
substantive questions we are asking today- particularly transmission, transportation and innovation. On
the transmission front, the question is how does America get natural gas from where it's produced to
where it's needed. Our producers in this country are the "gold standard" for development, leading the
rest of the world. Now America needs an infrastructure to match that. That doesn't just mean more
pipelines; it means better pipelines. The Committee is lucky that today General Electric will tell us a little
bit about their vision, for example, of an "Industrial Internet" that will allow us to link innovations in our
information network to our pipeline network to maximize efficiency, reduce emissions and improve
reliability.

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