Motions to Instruct Conferees on H.R. 4348, Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2012, Part II

Floor Speech

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Mr. TERRY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, and I rise in strong support of the gentleman from Georgia's motion to instruct conferees to support the Keystone pipeline in the transportation bill.

Let's start with a quick tutorial here. Right here above the United States border in Canada, a couple hundred miles north of our border, lies the second or third largest current reserve of oil.

Now, there's already an existing pipeline coming down through the Bakken fields in North Dakota. This blue dotted line is the new pipeline, the one that is of controversy now, mostly because the environmental left, the NRDC and some other organizations that have come out and opposed that because they don't want fossil fuel use, especially a heavier crude. Now, that's the focus of the debate. They have stated that their whole goal here is to kill this pipeline.

Now, what does this pipeline do for the United States of America? First of all, we have the second or third largest reserve here. This pipeline will bring 800,000 barrels per day. We've already heard from two different gentlemen that our country imports about 10 million barrels per day. So if we can bring 800,000 to a million barrels per day, that's that much less that has to be imported from a country like Venezuela. And, by the way, we import about 800,000 to 900,000 barrels per day from Venezuela. Maybe we can stop sending our dollars to Venezuela so they can buy military equipment from Europe--I'm sorry--from Russia to destabilize South and Central America, which is what these dollars are doing.

So it provides us a level of energy security; offsets imports into our country from countries we don't like.

The bonus here is jobs--10,000 to 20,000 jobs will be created directly. And we hear statements that it won't create jobs, but I can take you to the laborers' facility that has a project labor agreement in hand. I can take you to the IBEW that has a project labor agreement in hand. I can take you to several other of our unions that have agreements ready to go if they would start building this pipeline.

Now, I wanted to mention and clear up some of the misinformation that's out there regarding this pipeline in my home State of Nebraska.

First of all, in the efforts that we took to get this pipeline out of the politics of the White House and into reasonable hands to get this approved, we exempted the State of Nebraska, giving them enough time to find a new route. The President ignored that provision of the bill and still used the State of Nebraska as his excuse to kill the pipeline. We're here today because the President denied their permit, said no to the Keystone pipeline.

Well, as we stand here today, this pipeline has already been rerouted, a different route chosen off of the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The environmental assessment is occurring as we speak here today, and it'll be done in a few months. There is no longer an excuse for the President to use to kill this new permit just recently filed by TransCanada for this pipeline.

So in review, we offset the oil we import from other countries we don't like.

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Mr. TERRY. We create 20,000 jobs building this pipeline, and we have a relationship with China where we access the second or third largest reserve.

And the gentleman is right. There's a pipeline that they're building to go off west so the Chinese can have access to part of this. We need this oil. Let's complement our friends and let's pass this pipeline.

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