Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 57 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, November 14, 2007, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to talk about a different subject than you've been hearing about, one that I think should be talked about in the halls of Congress here: What is Congress doing about available, affordable energy for America?

I know it's Halloween, but when we find out the price of oil today on the market, we are all going to think it's a Halloween joke.

First, I want to show the record of oil prices, of how they have been rising. Now, this doesn't show the spikes up and down all along. These are annual average prices.

Just last week I was here speaking and we were at $90. But today I think we're off this chart because at the close of business on Wall Street today, oil was $94.53 a barrel.

I don't know about you, but that puts fear in my heart. The winter season is coming. People are going to need to keep their homes heated. People are going to need fuel to drive their cars. The American economy is going to need affordable energy to compete in the global economy. On October 31, 2007, oil closed at $94.53.

Now, 6 years ago, it doesn't show it on the chart, but 6 years ago, natural gas was $2 a thousand; now it's $8. Oil was $16. This is a 600 percent increase in oil prices in just 6 years.

Is it an issue? It hasn't been mentioned here today. It wasn't mentioned here yesterday. It wasn't debated last week. We are going to have record high home heating oil prices for those heating their homes, record high diesel prices for those who are transporting our goods up and down the highways, and so I guess the fair question is, what is Congress's plan for affordable energy for America?

Months ago I was down here on the floor and debated the House bill. The House passed a bill. We'll talk about it later in content. And simultaneously a little later, and the Senate is usually a little behind, they passed a bill. Now, you would think with energy prices spiking to record levels, there would be some sense of urgency in Congress. There would be some sense of urgency to get the Senate bill and the House bill together and get it on the floor to help Americans meet their energy needs.

Now, we have had some interesting things happen here. Speaker Pelosi forced the curator, those who run the Capitol here, to switch from coal to gas so we could lessen our carbon imprint. Now, that's going to cost the taxpayers $3 or $4 million because gas is the clean, green fuel and she thought it was better that we heat the Capitol with gas and not coal. Now, what is interesting is it would seem like we should be about conserving. I haven't seen a dollar appropriated to put double-pane windows in all of the Capitol complex. Most of them are single-pane glass. Now, most of us at home have done better than that. My office building, single-pane glass. On a cold winter day it frosts right up. It transmits lots of heat out, lots of heat in. Depending on where the heat is, it goes right through single-pane glass. But wouldn't it make more sense to conserve energy in the Capitol complex and do energy efficient windows and doors? No, we just switched fuels and spent an extra $4 million so our carbon imprint was less.

Now, we have also mandated that all government agencies, including ourselves, use those little round fluorescent screw-in light bulbs. I have some at home. My wife doesn't like them. I don't like them if it's a reading light. At least they vary. They are not the same quality of the incandescent bulb we are used to. We're spoiled. But we have mandated those in every appropriations bill this year, and what's disappointing, though, is that they are all made in China. We are mandating that our light bulbs come from China.

Now, while we talk about energy, we can talk about why we have such high prices. I want to switch charts here. And here we have a chart of the percentage of imports for America. Now, this chart is a little behind. It actually is almost up to 70 now. Every year we increase dependence on foreign, unstable countries by 2 percent. That's in the last decade. Every year. I think that number is going to increase, and I will explain to you why later, that it may even go up faster.

Now, while we are becoming more and more dependent on foreign oil, we have countries like China and India, and this is one of the reasons for high energy prices today. We have always been the only big user. We have always been the big dog economically. Well, we're one of the pack now. There are a lot of big dogs out there. China and India's energy use is increasing between 15 and 20 percent a year. They are building a coal plant in China every 5 days. They are opening a new nuclear plant for electricity every month. They are building the largest hydrodams ever known in the world routinely. They are buying up oil and gas reserves and making deals with other countries all over the globe so that China has the energy it needs to run its country. What is America doing? We will talk about that.

America does not have an adequate sense of urgency about providing energy for America, affordable energy for America. We passed a bill in 2005 that had a lot of positive incentives. But the problem is when you pass a bill, it's years before you have production of energy. And many of the incentives that were in that bill, many of the things that were helping us produce more energy are now being tried to be rolled back by the Democrat bills that are going to come before us, that have come before us, and will come back before us again in a conference report, and we will talk about that in more detail.

What does America want us to do? Well, the Americans I talk to, they want to be able to afford to heat their homes and drive a decent car. They'd like to be able to afford to buy food and other things after they pay their energy bills.

Now, these energy bills that have been passed some months ago have been languishing. I haven't heard much discussion. In fact, I haven't heard of a conference committee meeting.

It doesn't seem like 3 weeks ago when we had $80 oil; that was enough sense of urgency. It doesn't seem like last week when we had $90 oil; that was enough sense of urgency. And here we are at $94.53 oil, and that doesn't seem like enough sense of urgency. Now, reading the Wall Street Journal today, the article was scary, it said, ``We don't expect oil to stop at 100.''

Now, I expected energy to get expensive this year. I've been predicting it. And I had someone say, How did you know that? And I said, You've just got to be watching what's going on. There's an oil shortage in the world. There is tremendous demand because all the developing countries are now driving cars and have factories and are using energy. And specifically the big ones, like China and India, their economies are growing at record paces, are consuming a lot of energy. And we're going to be competing with them down the road.

What scares me, and I'm going to put $94.53 back up here, because that's correct. Here is what's scary about $94.53 oil. We, for the first time in many years, have not had a storm in the gulf. Every time we have a major storm in the gulf, it reduces supply of oil and gas; about 40 percent of our energy comes from the gulf. So when a storm like Katrina or Rita hits the gulf, or even one not as severe as them, it shuts in a lot of oil for weeks and months, and any damage that's done to rigs or refineries or pipelines or processing stations for the gas, it just shuts down capacity. We get a lot less energy after a Katrina. Some of those were not repaired for 9 months to a year, and that energy is just lost. You just don't get it because you have to keep producing every day.

Now, we have not had, for the first time in years, a storm in the gulf that has disrupted any amount of supply. That's a record. We always have at least one storm. And we still have a few weeks left, but the season is getting short. We have not had an unstable country. And the fact that's scary with $94.53 oil is that now about 90 percent of the oil in the world, of known reserves, is not owned by companies, but is owned, produced, refined and marketed by dictator, unstable, unfriendly governments. So a majority of the energy in the world is controlled by unfriendly, dictator-type governments. And if one of those tips over and their 3 million barrel a day is disrupted, where will the price go?

I asked one of the large energy producers this week in my office, I said, what if we have a storm in the gulf? $120 oil in 2 days, a serious storm. And this company knows because they produce there; they produce about one-third of the gulf. What if a terrorist struck a sending port or a ship or a major pipeline or a major refinery? Where will energy prices be? These are all potentials.

And I have been predicting this, and I have energy experts tell me I'm probably not wrong, we will read in the paper one of these days where China has purchased the total supply of some country that normally sold us oil, and that oil will no longer be available to us.

And on gasoline, we don't produce enough in this country. We don't have enough refining capacity. Twenty percent of our gasoline comes from Europe because when they switched to diesel, they have excess gasoline capacity, so they sell us gasoline. And this spring, when we had abnormally high gasoline prices, we had 60-some-dollar oil and we had $3 gasoline. And I was shaking my head, what's going on here? That's not normal. But that's what was happening. And so I checked, and here Europe was short on gasoline. They didn't have enough to sell us. And so there was a shortage in the marketplace, and of course Wall Street ran it up, abnormally high prices.

Now, today, with $94.53 oil, or more than $90 all week, if that translated into a market gasoline price, we're probably talking somewhere between $3.39 a gallon for gasoline and $3.59 a gallon of gasoline, depending on where you're at in the country. That's a long ways above the $3 price that we're approaching right now. And that's going to come because 80-something-dollar oil will put us at $3.19, $3.29 gasoline; $90 oil is going to push us up into the mid $3. And it's just a matter of time because, at the end of the summer driving season, when we switch the refineries over to make it home heating oil, there was a little surplus of gasoline in the marketplace, and so it has held the price down. And when that burns off and there is none of that left, we will be paying a lot higher prices to drive our cars because the truck people, the fuel oil is already up there. It's already higher, much higher. And home heating oil is much higher. Those who didn't fill their tank early this year for home heating have missed that opportunity because those high prices are already there.

The question I ask, I was concerned, and there are those who I've talked with that know a lot more than I felt that $75 oil for any period of time would put America into a recession. Now, that didn't happen, because we've had higher than 75 now for quite a while. What figure can the American economy absorb and not go into recession? All of our recessions have been energy driven, almost all of them. I think maybe there was one that wasn't, one or two. Every time we've had a recession in this country, and they last for years, a lot of people lose their jobs, employment slips, tax revenues are down, the government doesn't have enough money to pay its bills, a lot of Americans are hurting, unemployment rates go up. What figure can America absorb and not have a recession? Well, I don't think we have any wiggle room. I don't personally think we can handle this for a very long period of time. I'm not the expert, but a lot of people agree with me.

And I want to tell you, it's almost guaranteed that this is not the ceiling. See, we don't have a spike here because of a Katrina, a country tipping over, or some terrorist attack in the supply line system. Things are kind of going along. Now, there is a lot of instability in the world, but there is always lots of instability in the Middle East, so those little tremors come and go. So, what price can the American economy absorb? I don't think much higher.

The other thing that we don't talk about is natural gas prices a lot because people don't realize that natural gas prices are not like oil. This is a world price. Natural gas prices are country by country. And for 6 years now America has had one of the highest natural gas prices in the world, and that puts all of the manufacturers in this country who use it for heat and who use it as an ingredient, and we will talk a little more about that later, are at a tremendous disadvantage because of our continued very high natural gas prices.

Yes, it wasn't very long ago, just 6 years, that we had $2 gas and $16 oil, and today, we have $94.53 oil. And our dependency is at 66 and will soon be 70. America should be concerned about that.

I remember people talking that, when oil was cheap and gas was cheap, use foreign oil. We will use theirs while it's cheap, and we will use ours when it's expensive. Well, theirs is expensive, but we're not using ours.

Here is the map that's interesting. These red circles are areas loaded with natural gas and oil, and they're off limits to production. We're the only country in the world that says our Outer Continental Shelf, that's around the edges, 85 percent of it, is not open to production. Canada produces there, Great Britain produces there, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, Australia. Now those are all environmentally sensitive countries; they all produce there. Norway has become a rich country because of their offshore oil finds.

And a lot of people talk about Brazil being energy independent because of ethanol. Ethanol was just a piece of the pie. Brazil also went offshore and produced their energy. America, for 26 years, a combination of Presidential and congressional moratoriums from producing energy on the Outer Continental Shelf, and many parts of the Midwest like this one are locked up, too. And the legislation that's coming before us will lock it up some more.

Now, I don't understand that. I don't understand where a six-inch hole in the ground with a steel casing producing oil or gas, and specifically clean natural gas, is a threat to our environment. All the studies show that offshore, the majority of the oil that's found is from leakage of ships or natural seeps, because when oil is under high pressure underground, it will find its way to the surface. In fact, I come from Titusville, Pennsylvania, the home of the first oil well, Drake Well. We're all very proud of that. It changed the world, it started the Industrial Revolution. It started the new transportation system. Oil that was transportable, refinable, and it developed this country into the power it is today.

And it has the potential today of making us a second-rate nation because we refuse to use our own energy and we're forcing ourselves to purchase from unstable, undependable countries around the world. And their $95 oil, they're going to own us.

We just heard people talking here about them buying our debt. Yeah. Because we're spending so much of our resources purchasing energy that we have, but we've locked it up. I just find it amazing.

Now we're going to look at the legislation that should be coming, but there doesn't seem to be any sense of urgency. This is sort of a compilation of the energy bills that have passed both the House and the Senate and have not been conferenced on.

Now, first what we're going to talk about is it locks up 9 trillion cubic feet of American natural gas. It cuts off production from the Roan Plateau, a huge clean natural gas field in Colorado that was set aside as a national oil reserve in 1912 because of its rich energy resources for our future. This means that 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, more than all the natural gas the OCS bill that passed last Congress was put off limits.

Roan Plateau has already gone through NEPA. That's the environmental assessment that says it's safe to do it, all done. It is ready for lease sale. The provision was not in the original bill when it came out of the

Resource Committee, but was added almost with no debate, no hearings, and no real serious discussion. Make sense? No.

The next part here locks up 18 percent of our Federal onshore production of American natural gas. It cuts the categoric exclusion provision. And I will explain that a little in my terms. I helped put that in in the 2005 energy bill.

Redundant NEPAs allowed the anti-energy people from allowing the Americans to produce energy. So, land would be leased in the West, mostly in the West, and 5 or 6 years later, after they purchased the rights to it, they still weren't producing it because they were required to do multiple NEPAs. They do a NEPA on the original plan. Then they have to do a NEPA for the road plan. Then they have to do a NEPA for every site. And then for putting in the production equipment, another NEPA. So year after year after year, a NEPA study takes about a year. So years later, they still didn't have any production.

And so we said that one NEPA that covers all the aspects of producing energy in that area should be done, and that should pass the test. And we shouldn't do redundant NEPAs. But now they want to go back.

It locks up, this is huge, the third one, 2 trillion barrels of American oil from western oil shale. Now, western oil shale, everybody knows, is a huge oil reserve, and the underground can be tricky. We have oil companies on some of the private land they own there trying to release this, and they think they have a way to do it. It is somewhat similar to the Canadian tar sands. The Canadian tar sands have been around since I was a kid. In fact, I have a neighbor who bought rights to them many, many years ago, and he's now laughing because everybody wants to buy them at huge prices. And I don't know whether he has sold them yet or not, but I was kind of stunned that he was smart enough 30, 40 years ago to buy tar sands in Canada as an investment. And today they're producing 1.5 million barrels a day there. It's just over the American border into Canada. And their goal is to be up to 4 to 5 million barrels a day down the road. And fortunately for America, most of that's coming here. Our biggest supplier of energy is Canada, our good friend.

Now, Canadians are a little frustrated with us because they produce their energy resources. They're offshore, they're onshore, they're tar sands, and we keep locking ours up. Thus, North America has the highest natural gas prices because of us. If we produced equal to Canada, North America would have reasonable natural gas prices, not the highest in the world. But they keep selling to us.

Now, this 2 trillion, this bill stops the leasing program for oil shale reserves on Federal lands that will hold enough oil to supply us for 228 years. Now, that's a study. If it's half that, if it's a third of that, it's huge, and it could eliminate our dependence on, and that's the only reserve that I know of, that if we learn how to release it, could eliminate our foreign dependence on energy. But that's the only way.

But that is the only way. This is more oil than the entire world has used since oil was discovered at Drake well in my district 150 years ago. Meanwhile, in China, they are busily developing their oil shale fields.

The next one here locks up 10 million barrels of oil from the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. That is, again, an area that was set aside for production, set aside in 1923 for production of future energy needs in America. Then the next one breaches legitimate legal offshore energy contracts, and I have had several of those companies come in to me and say, hey, this is a contract. If Congress changes that, we are going to win in the Supreme Court because Congress doesn't have the right. I am not saying I agree with these leases and how they were done. They were done in the Clinton administration, but we have this legislation coming that is going to override those. It won't work. It will just delay the process. I am hoping that we can continue to negotiate these leases and have them out of the way.

The next one is really foolhardy. There are a lot of Members of Congress who hate oil companies. This inflicts a $15 billion tax increase on the American oil and gas industry. Seventy-five to 80 percent of the energy in this country is not produced by Big Oil. It is produced by little companies. I have two refineries in my district who will now pay a higher tax than any other company in Pennsylvania if this bill becomes law because we are going to tax the production of energy with an added tax over any other business.

Now, when you are short on something, and the prices are high, if you want to get less of it and make the prices higher, the sure remedy is to tax it. Well, they are going to tax it. I am not going to, but they are going to tax it.

Now, the next one down here, I am a big proponent of offshore drilling, and I will talk about that later, but I am also a big proponent of using coal, to gasify it, to make electricity, and that is called clean coal, and make liquids out of it. Penn State has a process to make jet fuel out of coal. The Air Force is in the process of trying to figure out how to have 60 percent of their jet fuel available from nonimport sources. They are working with natural gas right now. They are doing other studies, too, but they are working with natural gas now. If they are successful, and they get 60 percent of their 3 billion gallon a day, they are going to inflate gas prices even more, which will make it harder to heat our homes. I will talk more about that later. But coal to liquids should be getting the same treatment as cellulytic ethanol. I am for cellulytic ethanol, and this administration is funding six plants. It is still in the test tube. We are still working at it in the university laboratories, but I am for building those plants and streamlining this process. I think one plant is going to try to make it out of garbage, another switchgrass, another cornstalks, another one is woody biomass, but we need to be doing all those things. But to be not having an equal emphasis on coal to liquids, I fault this administration, and I fault this Congress. Because that is the largest energy source we have. We need to figure out how to use it cleanly. We need to be developing, and again, curtail our dependence on foreign countries.

Now, we also have in the legislation a false expectation by mandating a 15 percent of renewables to make electricity. I wish that were doable. I would vote for it if it was. I didn't vote for that. I voted against that amendment. I fought against that amendment. We currently make 3 percent of electricity with renewables because they will not count hydro, only the new hydro, and there is not much new hydro coming down the line. So to go from 3 percent, they are going to allow cost savings of 4 percent, so that gets us to 7, but the growth of wind and solar is nowhere near enough in the next decade or two to get us to 15 percent.

Now, what we are going to do is we are going to force those companies to pay fines. Do you know who is going to pay the fines? The electric rate users. Some States will come close because they have a lot of wind, and there are States that have solar. But most States will not. It should be an incentive-type program. It should be a carrot, not a stick. We should be incentivizing renewables for electricity. But when you mandate 15 percent, and I have charts and graphs to show that. I don't have them with me tonight. But there is no way to get there in the time frame they are asking.

I am going to change charts here and talk just a little bit about current energy use in America. These don't change a lot. I have been watching them for a long time. Currently, petroleum is 40 percent of our energy needs, and 66 percent of it comes from foreign, unstable countries. That number is going to escalate if we lock up the Roan Plateau. It is going to escalate if we lock up shale oil. It is going to escalate if we tax energy production and make it more expensive. Natural gas is 23. Now, this is a growing figure. It is interesting because about 12 or 13 years ago now, Congress removed the prohibition of making electricity with gas. That is when gas ceased to be cheap. We have always had $1.80, $2 gas, and it would go up a little, down a little, maybe up to $3 a year, $3-\1/2\ or $4. I remember some of those years in the seventies when it was a lot more costly to heat our homes. But it would come

back to $2 or $1.80. It never went much above $2. Now, it is way above. It is $8 and something right now, and we are still not into the high season. The average price for the year is somewhere between 9 and 10, and then when you get transmission costs and storage costs, we, as consumers, are going to be paying $13, $14, $15 for gas.

I believe that clean, green natural gas is really our best hope. But we have to drill for it. And people in this Congress are just as much against drilling a gas well as they are against drilling an oil well. And I think they are wrong on both. But there is no good argument. There has never been a beach dirtied by a gas well. There has never been an environmental threat by a gas well. It is the cleanest fuel we have. There is no NOX, no SOX, and a third of the CO2 if that is keeping you awake at night.

Now, coal is 23 percent. Coal has great potential for liquid or gas. But there is a real push around here against coal. I think it is a mistake. It is the one we have the most of. If we continue that, gas will be the winner, and gas prices will continue to rise. And if we continue to have the highest gas prices in the would, we just won't be a competitive country. Nuclear is at 8 percent. From the 2005 bill, we have a lot of companies going in for permits now. We need all 35 that are starting the process to be completed in a very short period of time if we don't want this figure to go down, because the energy electric use in this country is rising fast and nuclear is about 20 percent of it. But that figure will drop because nuclear has not grown. We haven't built a nuclear plant in a long time. The interesting part is, as we attempt to build nuclear plants, the shroud, which is the big steel casing that they use, we don't make them in America. The companies that are that far along in the permit process are buying them from Japan. I find that unfortunate, and someone told me an awful lot of the components are going to be purchased in Germany because we don't have the capacity because we have done so little with nuclear in the last decade.

Hydroelectric, a figure that continues to decline. Biomass is the fastest growing figure. That is wood waste. A lot of it is being used. There's a million Americans heating their homes with pellet stoves. That is compressed wood waste. We have power plants that are using it to top the coal load so that they can slide under the environmental standards because it burns a lot cleaner than coal. We have a lot of companies in the wood business and around where there is wood waste using it to heat their factories. Most of the dry kilns drying wood are now biomass burners. So biomass has just been sort of growing on its own because sawdust used to be a commodity. I remember in Pennsylvania when I was in State government, they were trying to make it a hazardous waste. I fought that because it is not a hazardous waste. And now it's a commodity that sells. People want it.

Geothermal, a nice way to heat your homes if you are not in zero climate. In a mild climate, it is a good exchange of using underground water, whether you have a loop system where you have a big piping system with water or whether you drill into the aquifers and use that water, you take heat out of it in the wintertime to warm your home, and you take cold out of it in the summertime to cool your home. But, again, it is an investment up front. I know people who have it. If they build a second home, they usually put it in unless they are in a high zero where there is a lot of cold weather. It has its limitations when the weather is zero.

Wind and solar, this is the part that I find scary. Too many Americans think that wind and solar are prepared to become major energy sources. You can see the numbers, 0.06, 0.12. If we double those numbers, they are still a pretty small fraction, and it will take years to do that. But, unfortunately, an awful lot of Americans want this group right here to be our major energy source. I wish there was a way to do that. There are an awful lot of Members of Congress who think petroleum, gas and coal are just evil and we shouldn't do any more production of it, and they won't vote for a bill to lease land. They won't vote for a bill to open up areas. Some of them are against nuclear. Some aren't. That is a mixed bag. But, folks, this is the major part of America's energy production. It is 94 percent of our energy production, nuclear, coal, gas and petroleum. And it will be a major part of our energy portfolio for a long time whether we like it or not because none of these are prepared to take over. I wish they were.

Now, there's a lot of creative things. But they are little niche players. They are little niche markets. They are not huge volumes. So it is important that Americans understand that whether we like it or not, fossil fuels are going to be our major energy source a lot longer than we want them. If we continue to not produce our own, then we are going to have to buy them from foreign countries.

Now, I want to talk about natural gas a little bit. This is America's gem. We have lots of natural gas. And I find it astounding that so many Members of Congress and three administrations in a row have locked up our Outer Continental Shelf, which has huge reserves of clean, green natural gas. I don't understand it. I don't know what they are thinking about. I don't know what their hopes are or dreams are, because, folks, we can't afford to continue to do that. Natural gas is a far more bigger part of our life than most people realize. Now, you see all of these products here. They are all made with natural gas. Not only as a heat source, but as an ingredient. Somewhere here you will find soaps and skin lotions and skin softeners. Yes, ladies, the skin softeners that you love and we all like that keep our skin soft are a direct derivative of natural gas stock. Polyurethane, plastics, petrochemicals, fertilizer, all made, fertilizer that we grow corn with to produce ethanol, 70 percent of the cost is natural gas. It is the reason in how we make all of these products. And yet we lock it up and treat it like it is something evil. I just plain don't understand that.

We have a bill that opens up the Outer Continental Shelf. Now, we are only doing it for natural gas. I think it should be for both because every other part of the world produces both. But I have not been able to get natural gas here. Now, we passed a good bill last session in the House that opened up gas and oil both. But we didn't get any action in the Senate. So we are going at it cautiously this time, just natural gas. This bill is very States' rights oriented. We will lock up the first 25 miles, can't produce it, that is out of sight. Eleven miles is sight line. The second 25 miles, States have a right to open up if they want to just by passing a State law. We will repeal the moratorium, but it doesn't repeal unless the States pass a bill. Now, the second 50 miles will be open unless the State passes a law and this gives States rights for 100 miles to close it. Now, this is much more conservative than I would like, but we are trying to get some natural gas for America to stop a calamity of starving our industry and our homeowners from affordable natural gas. Now, the second 100 miles would be open, period.

Those who produce natural gas say this would help immensely because clean, green natural gas can be our bridge to renewables. To make ethanol, we use a huge amount of natural gas. If we go to a hydrogen society, the only good way right now of making hydrogen quickly is natural gas. Natural gas is used to make biodiesel. Natural gas heats 50 some percent of our homes; 58 percent, I believe. It runs our major industries. It's the major feedstock for the polymers and plastic and fertilizer and petrochemical. We use huge amounts of it to make bricks and glass and steel and aluminum and to bend metal and to treat products, heat-treat things.

In my district, we have the powdered metal industry. They use huge amounts of natural gas to make that new powdered metal product that has brought the price of cars and vehicles and all kinds of moving parts down because it's so much less expensive than the old machining and forging of parts. Powdered metals. But they heat treat it with clean, green natural gas.

Natural gas is the fuel that should bridge us to where some kind of new energy, whether when we learn how to release hydrogen from water and then learn how to transport hydrogen safely, it takes years to develop all of the facets of an industry so that it becomes

our stable fuel source of the future. We need to be doing everything we can do in America for renewables. But we need to have adequate fossil fuels, and, specifically, natural gas.

Now, my bill rewards some people. The States would get up to $150 billion in royalties because States would get 30 some percent. There would be $100 billion left over in the Treasury of money we wouldn't have to pay in taxes because we could get the royalty off the gas, not oil. Now we have some cleanup funds here that I think are pretty unique: $32 billion for renewable energy research. That is real money to allow us to develop the fuels of the future. We have $32 billion for carbon capture and sequestration research so we can learn how to take the CO2 from coal plants and the CO2 from any fuel we burn and utilize it somehow, or sequester it. We have $20 billion to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, exactly what they need; $20 billion for the Great Lakes restoration, exactly what their program needs; $12 billion for the Everglades restoration; $12 billion for the Colorado River basin restoration; $12 billion for the San Francisco Bay restoration; and $10 million for LIHEAP and weatherization to help the poorest among us make their homes energy efficient and make energy affordable by helping pay their energy bills.

America is at a crossroads. We have been the big giant of a Nation, the powerful Nation all of our lifetimes. You know, it makes me sad to think that this Congress and administrations were unwilling to in totality agree and deal with the energy issue, making sure that America has available, affordable energy. Folks, that's doable.

I know there are people who talk on this floor about energy independence. That is really not doable. The only way we can be energy independent is if we got oil from the shale rock in large quantities over a period of time and where we no longer had to import oil. We import 17 percent of our natural gas today. If we opened up the gas field, we wouldn't need to import any. We would have lots of gas.

This is an interesting point about natural gas. We could fuel a third of our auto fleet. One of the problems with using gas in a vehicle is you can't go as far. You can't put a big enough tank in there. But we have lots of vehicles that don't go anywhere. We have all the service vehicles that are out servicing our homes, whether they are heating contractors or air conditioning contractors or lawn services, they could fuel up every night. In fact, they are developing ways you can fuel up from your gas line in your house if you have gas in your home. They are working on a way to fuel a car.

Every construction vehicle could be on natural gas because they already are fueled by a truck that comes up to the construction site and fills up the tractors and fills up the Caterpillars and all the heavy equipment and the trucks. Every taxicab could be on natural gas because they don't go big distances. Every school bus, every local person who doesn't drive a long distance could fuel their vehicle with clean, green natural gas.

If we opened up the gas fields that are really available to us, it could be a whole lot cheaper than oil. A whole lot cheaper and a whole lot cleaner. No knocks, a third of the CO2. I don't understand why we haven't embraced natural gas as our bridge fuel to the future, as I said previously.

But, folks, America better think very seriously in the weeks ahead. We don't have a long time to wait. Energy prices are going to continue to skyrocket because we are competing the whole world for the energy because we are buying it from them. If we produced our own, we don't have to worry about that.

I understand the complacency when it was $2 for gas and $10 for oil and it was so cheap. But, folks, it's not cheap today and it is never going to be cheap again. Now we do need to use less, we do need to conserve, we do need to keep continuing to research how to produce things with less fuel, heat our homes more efficiently, make them more energy efficient. We, in the meantime, need a strong, viable source of energy for America, and clean green, natural gas is the bridge to our future.

I hope and pray that this Congress will suddenly get a sense of urgency about the energy problems in this country.

Mr. Speaker, $94.53 oil should scare us into movement. We should have fear in our hearts, because this isn't the ceiling, as I started out at the beginning. There is no storm in the Gulf, no countries tipped over, no terrorist threat that has taken out supply. If they all happened simultaneously, only God knows what energy would be. It is imperative. Congress is the reason we have high energy prices, because they have locked it up.

There is also a lot in Alaska. There are huge reserves in Alaska that are not shown on this map. Congress has locked up this energy and three administrations have supported the moratorium for twenty-six years.

We are the only country in the world to lock up our own resources and force ourselves to buy from unstable countries who will own us. They are going to have the resources to literally buy every good, profitable business in this country. They are going to buy whatever they want to, because we are going to be forced to sell it to them, because when you are paying $95.43 for a barrel of oil that it costs them a dollar or two to lift in their country, they have nothing but riches.

Americans are going to have nothing but tragic situations, where our businesses can no longer afford to be here. We won't manufacture anything in this country of substance, and Americans will struggle to heat their homes and afford to travel around this beautiful land.

Energy affordability, available, affordable energy for America, should be the cry of this Congress. And if this Congress doesn't do that, if the energy bills when they come out that the House and Senate have now are not altered and talk about opening up energy, about increasing supply, that is the only thing that brings down prices.

Folks, we need to conserve, but we can't conserve our way out of this problem. As a country, we are demanding more energy every day as we grow, as our number of people grow, as the number of people that drive cars grows, as our population grows.

Folks, available, affordable energy is the issue that can bring this great country down to where it is a second-rate nation. I don't want that to happen, and I hope Americans will push their Congress Members into making available, affordable energy the number one issue in this Congress before we adjourn the 110th Congress, and that we deal with this issue, because we can deal with it.

This is an issue we can change. It won't change quickly, but we can make a lot of right moves. We can deal with all of the different forms of energy. We can open up supply for gas and oil. We can do coal-to- liquids, coal-to-gas. We can give nuclear another push. We can promote all the renewables and look for new transportation fuels to blend with our current fuels.

Ethanol has potential. Corn ethanol has limited potential, but there are problems with it. The biggest problem with ethanol, and I am not against it because it is made out of American products, but it is competing with our food supply. And ethanol does not go in the pipeline. The majority of our gas stations deliver by pipelines, and you can't put it in the pipeline. Already, with the ethanol plants we have, we have distribution problems, because you need a blending station to blend it and then need to haul it by truck or trailer. That is a system not in place adequately around the country.

We have as many ethanol plants under construction as we have producing ethanol today. I am not saying that is bad, but it is not a situation without problems and great challenges. Ethanol takes a tremendous amount of natural gas to make it. In Pennsylvania they are talking of doing a couple plants with coal. Many States would reject that. I commend the Pennsylvania government for going in that direction, using waste coal to make it so it doesn't further strain our natural gas supply.

But as we look at this map and think about Alaska, America can be far more self-sufficient with available, affordable energy if we just have the desire and the willingness to produce more of our own. I believe we must if we want to compete in the global economy.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 12 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, November 1, 2007, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address the House on an issue that I think should be a very high priority in this Congress.

On October 25, 2007, our world oil prices hit $92 a barrel and closed at $90. This is our chart from 1986. These are annual average prices. I can't analyze this year's price; we don't show the little spikes that happen throughout the year. But folks, we're clear up here, off the chart.

Two weeks ago, I stood at this microphone with shock and dismay that we had over $80 oil, had set record prices 2 weeks ago. Now, this would be understandable if we had had a storm in the gulf as we normally do every summer, but we have been protected for the last 2 years. We have not had a storm in the gulf that disrupted supply. We get 40 percent of our energy from the gulf. So whenever we have problems in the gulf we have oil spikes because oil and gas are deprived from the system for weeks, months at a time until all repairs are made, and so we lose a lot of our energy.

But this year and last year, we've had no disruptive storms in the gulf. We've not had a terrorist act that has blown up a refinery, a pipeline, or somehow impeded supply. We have not had a dictatorship. I don't think a lot of people realize that the vast majority of oil produced today, in fact 90 percent of the oil in the world, is produced by government-run dictatorships who own the oil, produce the oil, market the oil, skim off the profits for their social programs, and actually run their own oil companies.

It's kind of surprising to the world, but Exxon is now the 14th largest oil company in the world, our largest. But they are only 14th in the world. The other 13 are countries, dictatorships, some of them very unstable ones. Now, we haven't had one of them tip over, but here we are at $90 oil.

Six years ago, we got as low as $16, just 6 years ago. Now, it doesn't show it on here because these are average prices, but it got as low as $16. And we had $2 natural gas.

The question I have is, When will the House of Representatives of this Congress think that energy should be a priority issue for Americans?

What's really concerning is, as we look at $90 oil, we have somewhere slightly under $3 gasoline at the pump today. Now, that's not going to last because there is a lot of gasoline, there is a little extra gasoline in the market place, and this is the slowest time of year for gasoline usage, so the price is below the normal trend.

I talked to a refinery in Warren, Pennsylvania, today in my district and I said, where would, normally, gasoline prices be with $90 oil? If it stays there, now it has to stay there a while until the system becomes $90 oil because it's not $90 oil yet in the system. He said it will be about $3.29 or $3.30 gasoline. What does that do to the American homeowner, the American family trying to raise their children and go to work, go to school and travel, $3.29 to $3.30 gasoline?

We're going to have record-setting home heating oil prices this year for both natural gas, and particularly home heating oil. We already have record-setting prices for fuel oil for trucks, record-setting prices.

Now, the Senate passed a bill some months ago and the House passed a bill some months ago. And we heard a lot of chatter here a few moments ago about conferencing on the appropriations bill; and that's appropriate, but this week, last week, the week before, I have not heard any mention of conferencing on an energy bill for America. I don't know why they're not getting together. I guess it's just not a priority.

You now, why do we have record-setting oil prices? Because for three administrations in a row and 26 years of congressional rule we have locked up America's best oil and gas reserves. Then we can go up here to Alaska, and there are even larger spots up there locked up.

Now, I remember the arguments decades ago when gas was $2 a thousand and oil was $10 a barrel. People said, yes, we should use their cheaper energy and we should save ours. Should we be saving ours when it's $90 a barrel?

I don't know if you watched ``60 Minutes'' 2 weeks ago and watched Dubai build cities, build islands, build immense properties with our cash. That part of the world is enriched. They're buying our debt, they're buying our facilities, they're buying our buildings, they're buying our infrastructure because they have so much cash because $90 oil will enrich them far greater than they were enriched at $50 and $60 oil.

When is America going to realize, when is this Congress going to realize that high energy prices, the only way to fight them is to increase supply of all of our energy sources. They are market driven on Wall Street. Every day they're trading them on Wall Street. And when there's a shortage in the world, the prices go up. When there's a storm in the gulf, prices go up. When something happens in a country that produces two or three million barrels a day, prices go up because there is going to be a shortage.

Now, these are not caused by weather. These are caused by congressional action, not inaction, action. We have locked this up. This outer area is known as the Outer Continental Shelf. Should we produce there? It appears Congress thinks we shouldn't. Does Canada produce there? Yes. Does Norway produce there? Yes. Does Sweden produce there? Yes. Does Australia and New Zealand? Yes. Does Denmark? Yes. Do South American countries produce there? Yes. Is there another country in the world that doesn't produce on the Outer Continental Shelf? No.

America is the only Nation who has decided to lock up its energy resources. And maybe they were right when it was $2 for gas and $10 for oil, and we'll use theirs while it's cheap; but it's not cheap anymore.

I met recently with someone from the Department of State on energy, and they shared with me their concern that $75 oil would put this country, and maybe the world, into a recession. It didn't. But energy is such a part of our overall economy, overall lives, that when it reaches a certain point, it will put us into a recession. Every recession we've had goes to energy spikes, in the seventies, in the eighties and in the nineties. Energy prices have an immense impact on the economic future of our country, yet we sat here today, a body that's not even talking, Congress is not even talking about the energy crisis.

In fact, I guess they don't think it's a crisis. I thought it was a crisis for a number of years and I've been speaking out for a number of years, and I'm going to keep speaking out until this body decides that energy is something we need to deal with.

Now, why is energy so high? Well, what people don't realize, I was talking to a gentleman today from a world oil company, Statoil in Norway, stopped into my office just to talk. And he said the world is astounded by the amount of energy being used by China and India, the two largest populations in the world, as their economies are almost exploding with their population. Those two countries are moving forward with tremendous growth in their economies. Their energy use is growing between 15 and 20 percent per year. And their thirst for oil and gas and all other energy sources are causing the world's shortage.

We've never had competitors before. America has always been the big dog in the world marketplace. We've always been the big dog in the energy market. China will soon pass us in energy usage, and India is climbing fast.

And then you have all of developing South America. The developing world starts to use energy when they go from life on a desert, or nomad on a desert, to where they're living a life like we live. They use energy. They use electricity. They use heat. They use fuel in a vehicle. That's happening all over the world. So the demand for energy continues.

It is interesting. China has just made a deal with Cuba. They are going to be drilling 45 miles off the Florida coast and we can't drill within 200 miles. Does that make sense? Cuba and China will be producing oil 45 miles. Cuba is cutting deals with Canada, with Norway, and a number of other countries, I think maybe Russia, I am not sure on that one, but I know with China, where they are going to be producing oil actually within our 200-mile limit. They are

going to be producing oil where we can be producing oil, but we have chosen not to. We have chosen.

What does America want Congress to do? I think Americans want us to deal with the energy issue. They want available, affordable energy so they can heat their homes, they can drive to work and school, and they can live a decent life.

What does this Congress have on the table to deal with energy? Let's take a look.

These are some of the things that are in the energy bills that will be looked at in the House and the Senate. Does it produce more energy? No. We call it the ``no energy bill.'' It locks up 9 trillion cubic feet of American natural gas. The Roan Plateau. Why? I don't know. It is prepared. It is ready to be produced. It is ready to take to market. But, no, this Congress is going to say, ``That is off limits, too.'' This bill cuts off production from the Roan Plateau, a huge, clean natural gas field in Colorado that was set aside as a naval oil shale reserve in 1912 because of its rich energy resource. This means that 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, more than all the natural gas from the bill passed last year in the Gulf, off limits. It has already gone through the NEPA process. That is the Environmental Impact Statement, and they passed them. It is ready for lease sale. This provision was not in the original Natural Resources Committee bill but was added without hearings, without any input, any debate and very little discussion in Congress.

The next one, this one requires the redundant environmental studies to place a second well on existing oil and gas drilling pads. It really locks up 18 percent of the Federal onshore production of American natural gas. It guts the category exclusion provision from the Energy Policy Act of 2005, a provision I authored and I understand it. What it did was, NEPA is an act we have that you have to go through an environmental assessment to do anything. It takes almost a year to do this environmental assessment. I had people tell me in the West who had leased land, 5, 6 and 7 years ago and hadn't drilled a well yet because they were doing their fifth, six and seventh NEPA. They had to do a NEPA on the original plan. Then they had to do a NEPA where they were going to build the roads. Then they had to do a NEPA on every well site. Every time they turned a corner they had to do another NEPA, and they hadn't gotten a well drilled. It was being utilized to thwart energy production because they believed we shouldn't produce energy. So we took away the redundant NEPAs, and now they want to put them back.

Now, this one is really interesting. It locks up 2 trillion barrels of American oil from the western oil shale. What is western oil shale? This is an oil shale reserve in the West that some say has enough oil to supply us for several hundred years. We have to refine the process of removing it from the shale rock that it is in. It is somewhat similar to what the Canadians have done with tar sands. They have been talking about tar sands in Canada since I was a kid as being a great oil reserve. They have worked at it to where now they are getting about 1\1/2\ million barrels a day. Their goal is soon to have, in some period of time, to have 4 million barrels a day. We are going to be the benefactor because we buy most of it, because we import a lot of oil. Thankfully, Canada produces a lot more than we do. They have worked at the tar sands with process to release that oil from those tar sands. It takes a lot of energy to do it. It takes a lot of natural gas to do it. They are fortunate. They have a lot of natural gas there, too, and they produce theirs. We don't produce ours. But we are going to lock up the shale oil. We are going to stop the production of it. We are going to stop the experiments of trying to get that shale oil so Americans can have some of their own oil and not have to pay foreign countries $90 a barrel for it.

Do you know what is scary about $90 oil? That is without a storm in the Gulf. It is without a dictatorship tipping over. It is without terrorist attacks. If any one of those happened tomorrow, if we have a storm in the Gulf, I had two energy experts tell me this morning, I said, ``What will oil be?'' They said, ``$120 a barrel if a major storm hits the Gulf that disrupts our refineries and disrupts our oil supply.''

Folks, we are already in trouble. We better pray that we don't have a storm. We better pray that dictatorships stay stable. I don't know about you, but I am not comfortable with that. I am not comfortable with this process we are in. It also locks up 10 billion barrels of oil from the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. Why? Many of those oil reserves up there are tundra. They are frozen ground. There is little life. But we are saying we are not going to produce it. They want to produce it. The Alaskans beg to produce it. But Congress says ``no.'' Legal offshore contracts are being thwarted. We have legislation moving because of contracts that had royalty incentives in them that they think are too low. Now, whether they are or not, Congress doesn't have the right to change legal contracts. The Clinton administration signed them. They are law. They are a contract. But that is part of our legislation.

This one is really crazy. There are a lot of Members of Congress that hate the oil companies. I won't say that I am in love with them. But a $15 billion tax increase on the American oil and gas industry. When we tax the production of energy on our shores, that means we are less competitive and we are more likely to buy energy offshore.

And we will get to that chart in a minute. We are tremendously dependent on foreign energy. For us to tax, what they are doing was when we had the corporate tax cut for employers to grow in this country, we had a 4 percent cut. They are taking that away. The manufacturer right down the street will pay 4 percent less tax than the guy who produces energy right up the street. I don't think that makes sense, because when you increase the taxation on energy, the users pay it. The gasoline price goes up. The fuel oil price goes up. The natural gas price goes up. We are taxing ourselves. And it seems to me $90 oil is enough. Why do we want to tax it?

While they are trying to get at big oil, I have American Refinery, a little 10,000-barrel refinery in Bradford. It used to be Kendall Refining. They now pay the higher priced taxes. That was a company that we put together a few years ago. The State government helped them. When Kendall left us and we had a refinery and the Kendall brand got sold off to another company, and American Refinery, a smaller company came in and bought it, I used to say it was put together with chewing gum and rubber bands. But it worked. We now have 400, 500 employees there. They are a growing company. They have developed another brand. They are entrepreneurs. They are doing good. And we are going to make them pay higher taxes.

United Refinery in Warren, not big oil. But they provided the gasoline for most of New York State and Pennsylvania. They are going to pay 4 percent more now in income taxes. And who pays it? We do by raising the cost of energy.

Now this one down here I find frightening. There is nothing in the Democrats' bill about coal to liquid or coal to gas. It would seem like when we had 70 and $80 oil, that was enough incentive that we ought to start figuring out how we make liquid energy out of coal. Not burn it; turn it into gas. There are processes to do that. In World War II, Germany fought us because we barricaded them. We didn't allow them to have oil shipments. They had to make their own energy. The Germans are pretty smart people. They figured out how to make it out of coal, the Fischer-Tropsch method and several other methods. Penn State has just developed a process to make jet fuel out of coal. Instead of us incentivizing and promoting energy from coal and liquids and gas so we learn how to do it so we get it streamlined, so we make it compete with oil, so we would be less dependent on 90 or $100 oil. No, we are not going to do that because coal has CO2. We can't do anything that puts carbon in the air.

I said to some I was arguing with recently, well, let's start eight plants, and we will give them a dual role. We will say, ``We want you to streamline the Fischer-Tropsch process and you streamline this process, and let's get it going. Your secondary mission will be to sequester the carbon and figure out how to deal with it. Let's practice. Let's get to work at it.'' No, we can't do that. Coal is out.

I see coal electric plants all over this country being turned down for permits. That is going to have a huge impact on electric prices because nuclear and coal are the cheapest electric prices we have. Coal to liquid should be something, and coal to gas should be things that we are incentivizing.

Now, the interesting one down here at the bottom, raises false expectations by mandating unrealistic 15 percent RPS. Now, what is RPS? It is renewable portfolio. It says that companies making electricity in America have to use 15 percent, they have to produce 15 percent of it from renewables. I am for that. But when you mandate it by law, and it is not achievable, what happens? They are going to pay penalties. Who is going to pay the penalties? The electric users. Or they are going to cheat. Currently we make 3 percent of our electricity from renewables, 3 percent. And we are going to mandate 15 percent.

Now, Pennsylvania has a mandate. But they were smart. They have waste coal. They use the cleanest process they know. But that is being included in their standards, renewable standards, using the waste coal where we clean up the environment when we get rid of that runoff from the coal piles. So Pennsylvania was smart. They are using it. Now, some States will be able to do it more so than others. But some States, if you have a lot of wind farms, the only States that come to mind with real sizable wind farms that produce any amount of wind energy is north Texas and North Dakota. They will be able to do some wind. Solar is still on the margins everywhere. We are hoping and praying solar becomes a bigger factor. But we are going to say that we have to produce 15 percent of electricity from renewables. I wish that was simple. But it is not.

Let's look for a moment at where our energy use is. Currently, 40 percent of our energy is petroleum. And 66 percent of that comes from foreign countries. A lot of them unstable dictatorships. Natural gas is now 23 percent and fast growing. Coal is 23 percent, and I say will soon be shrinking because Federal policies, Federal regulators and EPA are making it very difficult to permit a new coal plant. There are many Members of Congress who don't want new coal plants, even though they are using the newest, cleanest methods.

Nuclear is at 8 percent and shrinking because the amount of electricity is growing, but nuclear has been studied. Now, there are 35 plants starting the process of permitting. The 2005 act speeded up the process.

It used to take 10 years to get a permit. They have told them they have to do that in 4 years, then it takes another 4 to 5 years to build the plant. For a new nuclear plant to begin producing electricity, you're probably going to be looking at a minimum of 10 years. There's one, I think, that has a complete application in; the rest are in the process. Now there are 35 that are in the process, and we need them all permitted by 2030 and built and producing electricity to keep nuclear at 8 percent of our grid, just to keep status quo. That means we are going to have to have more of something else. And if we don't meet that goal, we are going to have to have more of something else to replace nuclear.

Hydroelectric is 2.7 percent of our overall energy power. Nuclear is actually 20 percent of the grid, but 8 percent of overall. Hydroelectric is 2.7 percent. Again, a figure that is dropping because as energy use rises and it remains static, and there are many Members of Congress who want most of our dams in place torn down. When they tear a dam out, we lose hydroelectric power because they don't believe we should have ever built dams.

Now, the only energy field portfolio that is showing pretty steady growth is biomass. That surprises a lot of people. That is wood waste. This year more and more Americans will heat their homes with pellet stoves. Pellet stoves are saw dust, wood waste pressed into a pellet, put in a nice heating unit in your home. They can be put in fireplaces. More and more Americans, many use wood stoves, but they are now using pellet stoves. People who can't cut wood or don't have access to wood, and that is biomass, wood waste.

There are many companies in the wooded areas where there's a timber industry that heats their factories with wood waste because they have it. They take the old trash wood and they grind it up and they burn it. We have dry kilns in the timber industry. We used to run them all with natural gas. Now they can't afford to. They are putting in wood waste boilers.

In fact, I had a friend a couple of years ago when I saw gas prices rising, I said to him, How do you dry your wood? I knew they had two plants. They said, Well, we use natural gas. I said, Had you ever thought of putting wood waste? He said, No, why would we do that? I said, Well, natural gas is going to get pretty expensive.

Well, they had a little meeting about it and decided not to do it. A couple of months later they called me and said, How did you know gas prices were going up? I said, Well, I just knew it. They said, We got our new contract and our prices quadrupled and we can't afford to dry wood with gas anymore. But it took them a year to buy the equipment to put in a biomass burner.

There are many coal power plants who are topping off their load with wood waste so they get under the EPA standards, because wood burns a lot cleaner than many fuels. So the new hope for biomass is cellulosic ethanol. Now, that is still in the test tube. This administration is pushing six new plants. Even though it's still in the test tube, there are those who think they are close to the process.

Now, geothermal is one that we have high hopes for. That is where you use groundwater temperature. You either pump water out of an aquifer and put it back after you take heat out of it, or take coal out of it; or you put in a big loop system and fill it with water and use the ground to cool and warm the water after you have used it.

Now, wind and solar are the ones we have tremendous hope for. Windmills are being talked about everywhere. Solar. What a lot of Americans don't realize is they are not ready to take over. We have a growth curve in the use of energy.

These renewables at the bottom people think can supply our future needs, and we don't need to drill and we don't need to use gas and we don't need to use coal. And most of them don't want nuclear either. This is what we have to use. I wish it was growing at the rate that it would fill the bill. I wish it was ready to take over. It's not. We are incentivizing, we are supporting, we are subsidizing; but it has to become where it will pay for itself somewhere down the road. Though it's growing, when you multiply wind by two, it takes years to double it; solar by two, it's still a very small part.

Let's just talk about where we get our oil, once again. We are actually higher than 60. We are up here at 66, because this is a 2- year-old chart. We are up here at 66. We are increasing dependence on foreign oil 2 percent a year. Now, if we pass the Democrat plan, I predict our only option, if we pass this plan and take gas off the table and oil off the table, we will increase 3 percent a year in the future.

Foreign dependence, unstable dictatorships: 90 percent of the world's oil is owned, produced and marketed by a government-owned oil company, a dictator. Our best friend ought to be Canada. We buy more oil from Canada than anybody, and we buy most of the 17 percent of our natural gas. We import I think about 15 percent of it comes from Canada. So we should be saying: Thank you, Canada.

But when it comes to oil dependence, and I hear people on the House floor talk all the time oil independence, we have got to be independent, there is no way in the next decade America could even conceive of being oil independent. Anybody who says that doesn't know the numbers, doesn't know the facts. At the same time, they say you can't drill out here and drill off the coast and you can't drill in the Midwest and Alaska, but we want to be energy independent, wind, solar and geothermal. I wish they were right, but they are not.

These are just the facts, folk. These aren't opinions; these are just the facts. Here's the supply of natural gas. Natural gas is becoming the choice fuel because we use it to make ethanol, we use it to make fertilizer to grow the corn to make ethanol, we use it to make hydrogen, we use it to make most of our products. I will show you that chart in a minute.

Natural gas is the one that is going to have tremendous pressure upon it.

It's the one that heats 58 percent of our homes. It's the fuel we ought to be the most concerned about. Why? It's not as bad price-wise today as oil. But when oil is $90 a barrel, the whole world pays that, and so all our competitors that we compete with in the global marketplace pay that. But we have one of the highest prices for natural gas of anyplace in the world.

On this chart, there is $1.85, $4.90, $1.65, and $7.20 is about our price. Russia, $1.50. But Trinidad is the one I am worried about. They are building every kind of manufacturing plant known to man in Trinidad. That is a very short shipping distance from the United States. If we think China is tough competition, wait until Trinidad starts making our bricks and our glass and our bulk commodities, because their natural gas prices are a fraction.

You know, I want the American working people to have a job. When we look at the next chart, we will see why natural gas is the one we should be most concerned about. Most people don't realize that natural gas is the feedstock for all these products. I don't mean that it is just the energy we use to make them. It is part of the ingredient.

I mentioned fertilizer a little bit ago. The fertilizer we grow corn with, one part of it is 70 percent natural gas. There is another one, I can't remember the name, some sort of ammonia, it is 90 percent natural gas. Natural gas is what we make it out of. So farmers are paying huge prices for energy, and in the last 2 years, 50 percent of our fertilizer business has gone offshore, and I find that very troubling. Whether it is household products, skin softeners are a derivative of natural gas, shampoos, pipe, clothing, plastic products, plastic bottles. All these products. Tires have natural gas to make them and natural gas as an ingredient.

It is the mother's milk of manufacturing in the world, and we are paying the highest prices for it of anybody in the world, and that puts American manufacturers and processors at a disadvantage. When oil is $90, the whole world pays, unless they have their own. If they are buying oil, they pay it. But natural gas, there is not a world marketplace because you can't just ship it around.

We buy about 2 percent of our natural gas, liquefied natural gas, called LNG, that comes in large tankers. Unfortunately, it comes from the same parts of the world where we buy our oil: foreign, unstable dictatorships.

Folks, energy for America, affordable energy for America should be the number one issue in this Congress. It should be the number one issue on the White House's agenda. It should be the number one issue in the Senate's agenda. Affordable energy for America.

Why should it be in crisis mode? Any of the things we have talked about, whether we are opening up the Continental Shelf, whether we are opening up land in the Midwest, wherever we are going to produce energy, whether we are going to do coal to liquids, whether we are going to do nuclear, all of those initiatives take 8 to 10 years before we have the energy to run America.

The longer we wait, the more trouble we are going to be in, because what is going to happen, it is my opinion, that Congress thinks little about America as a country that has to learn how to compete in the new global economy. The debate on being in the global economy is over. We are a global economy. We trade with everybody. We have to compete. There are developing countries everywhere, and we have to sharpen our tools, we have to sharpen our competitiveness, we have to help our manufacturers stay alive in this country.

The first thing we ought to do is give them decent energy prices, less litigation, better tax laws. You tax jobs because that is what you tax when you tax business. A lot of people say, we are just taxing business. Well, businesses are jobs. I was talking to a gentleman, a Member of the House the other day, I was talking about a cost to business we were debating about, and he said, they have got lots of money; they can pay for that.

I said, sir, they have choices. Do they grow this plant here, or do they grow this plant over here where costs are less?

They are going to grow that plant and their production where costs are less. It is a competitive world. They have to compete with competitors. And Congress needs to make priority number one helping American job makers, help American businesses compete. And that means affordable energy, legal reforms, tax cuts for business, regulatory reform to be fair to business, help our companies make sure they have the skilled workers they need with technology education, which we are terrible at in this country. We are a failure. We are one of the worst, teaching the working people the new skills they need.

It used to be 50 percent of Americans had to show up at a plant and within 6 weeks they knew their job and had a good job for the rest of their life. Not true today. Today you need to have skills, a set of skills that are certified with some sort of a 1-year or 2-year certificate that says, yes, he or she has this ability and she can provide this company with the skills they need to compete in the global marketplace.

America is being challenged, my friends. We are being challenged by fast-growing nations who have plans on action. On the energy side, China is opening a coal plant every 5 days. They are opening a new nuclear plant every month. They are building the biggest hydro-dams in the world. They are locking up oil and gas supplies all around the world. And we sit here and do not have a plan of action.

The 2005 energy bill had a lot of good pieces in it, and I want to congratulate all of those that created it and got it passed. It took like 4 years to pass it because this Congress didn't want to deal with energy. But, folks, it is not enough. It was just the starter. It was just the primer.

We are now challenged with a world shortage of energy. America must figure out how to have their own. Now, I agree, we have to conserve more. We have to use it more wisely. We have to teach Americans how to be careful and not waste energy. And we need to help small businesses be energy efficient, like big businesses.

Big businesses are cutting their energy bills. I have been told by many of them, they say we cut our energy bills 20 percent the last 4 years. But you know what? Energy costs us more, because energy prices are going up faster now.

And they were discouraged because they had worked so hard. Big business has the ability to figure out the cheapest way to do it, but many Americans don't understand and we need as a government to provide the technology and the education so that people know how to use energy wisely and purchase energy-efficient appliances and energy-efficient cars. We need to conserve.

But folks, we also need to have affordable energy to run this country. Folks, America is at the crossroads. Today it is $90 oil. Two weeks ago I was here, it was $80 oil. I didn't expect this. I predicted that energy prices would rise steadily this fall. I didn't think they would spike. We haven't had a storm in the Gulf which we were afraid of, we haven't had a country topple, which can cause 2 or 3 million barrels a day to come out of the system. We haven't had a terrorist attack which interrupted oil supply.

But in spite of that, we have fast-rising oil prices. If we couple that with any of the three I just mentioned, we have $100-$120 oil. I can guarantee you this country cannot afford $100 a barrel for oil and stay competitive and have a thriving economic base. We will go into the tank. We will be in a recession, and this Congress needs to take this issue seriously.

You know what bothers me in the Presidential debate, and I listened to two Presidential debates. The press asks the questions, and so I blame the press. The press doesn't take this issue seriously. The press doesn't understand this issue very well. If they did, they would be asking every Presidential candidate in every forum: What is your energy policy for affordable, available energy for America?

I haven't committed to a Presidential candidate yet because I don't see a candidate that has a good, well thought-out energy policy for America. That will be the issue the next President has to deal with because the Congress in the last decade, we have not adequately dealt with energy's availability and affordability for America.

Without a crisis, without a storm in the Gulf, we have $90 a barrel oil, and it hit $92 today. I am going to conclude my comments this evening with America needs a bona fide energy plan. We need to open up the Outer Continental Shelf where we are energy rich.

My legislation opens it up for natural gas, and I hope we can get it considered. I will conclude with that chart. Our bill says that the first 25 miles remain locked up, and you can only see for 11 to 12 miles, so nobody will even see it. It will not hurt the shoreline. It won't be unsightly. The second 25 miles are options of the State. If they want to open it, they can. The second 50 miles are open automatically for natural gas, but the States still have the right to close it if they choose to. By passing a law with the Governor's signature, they can keep it closed for the first 100 miles. The second 100 miles it is open. That is a pretty soft bill. That is not what I would like to do, but that is what I hope to coax this Congress into doing so we do something for natural gas.

We will give $150 billion in royalties to the States, $100 billion for the treasury, $32 billion for renewable energy. That's real money to help renewables; not promises, real money; $32 billion for carbon capture sequestration research, and that can come from the payments of royalties; $20 billion to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, exactly what they have been needing; $20 billion to clean up the Great Lakes restoration, exactly what they have been needing; $12 billion for the Everglades; $12 billion for the Colorado River basin; $12 billion for the San Francisco Bay restoration; and $10 billion to help the poorest of Americans winterize their homes and pay their heating bills in the wintertime.

Folks, the NEED Act is the act Congress needs to pass. We have 160- some cosponsors. It is bipartisan. The gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie) is my co-partner on this bill. It is the bill that America needs to have in its energy package, but neither the House nor Senate are talking about it.

On top of natural gas and offshore, we need to have a plan for nuclear, the expansion of nuclear in America. We need to have a plan where we are moving forward with coal to liquids and coal to gas. We need to have a plan where we push wind and solar and all renewables. And yes, we should look at many dams we have that are not harnessed, harnessing them for hydro. There are many dams in America that could be harnessed for hydro.

And yes, we need to do ethanol and biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol. Landfill gas should never be flared. It should all be plugged into the energy pipeline. We need to get serious about not wasting energy in America, conserving energy in America, and producing energy for Americans that is affordable and available so this winter they can afford to heat their homes, they can afford to run their businesses, and the jobs will not be pushed offshore.

High energy prices have pushed more jobs offshore than any other fact that this Congress talks about. And energy has the potential of pushing almost every manufacturing and processing job that is left in America offshore if we don't deal with the energy issue. Energy is a crisis for the future economic viability of America.

I challenge this Congress, both bodies and the White House, to get serious about it. Affordable, available energy for America, we could do no more. That's the least we can do to make sure Americans have the quality of life that they should have, they have a right to, and they deserve.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 39 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, October 29, 2007, at 12:30 p.m., for morning-hour debate.

Yes. Natural gas, I call it America's clean, green energy, no NOX, no SOX, a third of the CO2. It's almost the perfect fuel. Now, a lot of people don't realize what all we do with natural gas, but natural gas is the basic ingredient of many of our products, polymers, plastics, petrochemical. Everything we manufacture has some form of natural gas in it or we have used natural gas to do it.

Natural gas is America's hope for the future. I call it the bridge fuel.

Now, just a few years ago, in fact, 6 years ago, we had $2 natural gas, and we had $16 oil. Just 6 years later we now have $7 natural gas, but we haven't had a storm in the gulf yet, we haven't started our winter heating yet. We know those prices will skyrocket much higher.

Well, it amazes me. I am going to speak a little bit about oil. $87.50 was the price of oil, that it just closed at. Not a crisis in this Congress. I haven't heard any rustling of activity. We have a Senate bill and a House bill not conferenced on yet. I haven't seen where the House and the Senate have agreed to have their conference committee and move forward with their bill.

Now, maybe it's a good thing they don't, because let's just look at it. With the natural gas prices we have today, highest in the world, here is what their bill does. Their bill locks up 9 trillion feet of natural gas in the Roan Plateau. The Roan Plateau is a huge, clean natural gas field in Colorado that was once set aside as the Naval Oil Shale Reserve in 1912 because of its rich energy resources. That means that 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, more than all the natural gas from the OCS bill that passed last Congress in the gulf, will be put off-limits.

The Roan Plateau is ready to go. It has already gone through NEPA. It's ready for lease sale. This provision was not in the original Resources Committee bill and was added without any hearings in the 11th hour. That's the kind of legislation this Congress is putting forth to cause natural gas prices to continue to increase, locks up 18 percent more by policy changes.

I had some amendments in the energy bill in 2005. This guts the categoric exclusions if we stop allowing redundant NEPAs to stop the process. We had leases in the West where they had leased the land for oil and gas production, and 5, 6 and 7 years later, they are doing redundant NEPAs.

They had to do a NEPA for the whole layout. Then they had to do a NEPA for the road construction. Then they had to do a NEPA for every location. A NEPA study takes about a year. There is no reason that an overall NEPA on

the project couldn't cover all those aspects in a year's time and make sure we do it right. No, we are going to take away that, and that will lock up more natural gas. Of course, we just heard from our friend about the 2 trillion barrels of oil from western oil shale.

Well, it's similar to tar sands in Canada. Everybody thought that wasn't a good thing. Well, they are now producing 1.5 million barrels a day. Their goal is 4 million a day. They are increasing every month, because they figured out how to release the tar sand oil, and we need to be working at releasing the oil shale oil because we have trillions of barrels there.

Should we have policy? Should we have legislation going that's going to take oil and gas? Then we go on down here a little further, we are going to have a $15 billion tax increase on the production of energy and the processing of it. Does that make sense? That means it is going to cost American taxpayers $15 billion more for energy somewhere down the road. Should we be taxing the production of oil and gas? I don't think so.

There is nothing in the bills before us about coal-to-liquids. We are the Saudi Arabia of coal. It's a tragedy in America that we are not moving forward with coal-to-liquid and coal-to-gas, because, you know, today we are 66 percent dependent on foreign oil, and we are growing 2 percent a year, and we have $87.50, today's closing price. We hit $90 a few days ago. And just 6 years ago, it was $16. How much can the American economy absorb without a recession?

I was told by someone from the Department of State that they thought $75 oil for any length of time would put America in a recession. It didn't. What some figure is a figure that the American economy can no longer absorb. Now we are approaching the heating season. Sixty-two percent of Americans heat their homes with natural gas.

What do we have? We have it locked up. These are all areas that are locked up. Clean, green natural gas. A natural gas well has never contaminated a beach. It has never really done major environmental harm. But, no, America has a policy that we are not going to use the cleanest, greenest fossil fuel there is, natural gas. We're just not going to produce it.

I don't understand that, but that's where we are, folks. High gas and high oil prices are because this Congress, not just this current Congress, but historically, 26 years ago Presidents and Congress locked up the outer continental shelf. We are the only country in the world not to produce it, the only country in the world not to produce.

This is the greatest energy reserves we have. Eleven miles offshore you don't even know they are there. You don't see it. I have legislation that says the first 25 miles will not even be open for drilling. The second 25 miles would be controlled by the State. The second 50 miles would be open, but States would still have the right to pass a bill to not produce if they don't want to. That gives States rights. Then the second 100 miles would be open.

Folks, when we make these decisions to open these up, when we make the decisions to make any major coal-to-liquid, coal-to-gas, when we make decisions to reopen nuclear and get it moving again, you are talking 8 to 10 years before you have any energy.

America is in a crisis today. I think $87.50 oil is a crisis. We have $7 gas, and we know it's going to spike as soon as we start using our winter supply. When American homeowners find out the price of home heating oil, they are going to be pretty angry at Congress, and they ought to be.

Now, the gas prices that are out today, I heard the gentleman say $3.09. In my State it's $2.89. But gasoline prices have not caught up with $80 oil. $80 oil means $3.29, $3.39 gasoline. There is still a glut of gasoline in the marketplace. This spring we had $3 something gasoline with $60 oil because there was a shortage of gasoline in the world.

We buy 20 percent of our gasoline now from Europe. We don't produce enough in this country. Europe didn't have any to sell us because they were using more than normal. There was a world shortage and so our price was much higher than it ought to have been, because it's a separate marketplace.

Now, just wait till gasoline catches up, the summer fuel burns off. Our refineries are now making home heating oil, and those on home heating oil are going to pay a tremendous price because there is none of that in the system. Those heating with propane are going to pay a much higher price. Those heating with natural gas are going to pay 10 to 15 percent more. Home heating this winter is going to be very expensive.

Do you know who even feels the pain worse, small businesses who use a lot of energy. There are no programs to help them. There is no LIHEAP funding to help them.

Small businesses in America are going to struggle to make a profit because of energy prices. And natural gas, being one of the highest prices in the world, and we have lots of countries with very cheap natural gas, we're going to continue to export petrochemical jobs, polymer and plastic jobs, fertilizer. You know, here we're using ethanol now, it's big. We have to grow a lot of corn to make ethanol. We have to use a lot of fertilizer. Seventy percent of the cost of fertilizer is natural gas. If we make a hydrogen car, it's going to use natural gas. Natural gas is the feedstock for most of our manufacturing. It's what we heat our homes with.

We need energy policy here in Congress. We don't want a bill that takes energy away from Americans. This bill takes energy away from Americans. This bill makes energy more expensive. The bill before us does nothing to produce energy and to bring down gasoline prices, to bring down home heating prices and to keep American jobs here. And there's no reason that America cannot be in charge of its future destiny with natural gas.

We can't control the oil market. We can control our natural gas market. We can be self-dependent. We now import 17 percent of our natural gas. We wouldn't have to import any of it. America is rich in natural gas, the clean, green fuel.

And I impose this Congress, natural gas could actually fuel a third of the auto fleet. It would save a lot more than CAFE standards. And I'm for better CAFE standards. But it would immediately take all construction vehicles, school buses, taxicabs could all be on natural gas. That's a known technology. It's just a conversion.

Folks, clean natural gas is what America needs to be about as we build our renewable future. All the renewables are built off of natural gas. Natural gas is the feedstock. Folks, we need clean, natural gas so Americans can afford to heat their homes and can afford to drive their cars.

Mr. Speaker, it's a pleasure to join you this evening and talk about an issue that I think is vital to America's future.

We're in the beautiful time of year. My favorite time of year is the fall season, and it's arrived. We have now a week of fall behind us. The cool days and cold nights will soon be here all so quickly, and the home heating season will begin where Americans will struggle this year to keep their homes warm, and American factories and businesses and manufacturers will struggle to pay their very high energy bills to continue to compete in a global economy, manufacturing, processing and distributing their goods.

Home heating oil prices this year will be record highs with the $80 oil that's upon us and that has been with us for more than a week now. Home heating oil prices will have the largest increase, and those who heat with home heating oil will be under severe pressure to be warm affordably. Propane and natural gas prices are scheduled to go up again this year, propane a little more than natural gas, but both of them, and that's barring no storms in the gulf.

We've been very fortunate in the country. For a year and a half now, we have not had a major storm in the gulf, and why that's a problem is 40 percent of America's energy comes from the gulf. And when we have a major storm there like Katrina and Rita in the same year, there's huge disruptions in the ability to produce both gas and oil and refine it and process it and ship it around this country, and it will help prices to raise drastically.

I guess the question I ask tonight is, what is Congress doing? Is it a discussion? I don't know about you. I've listened to the last two Presidential debates, one Republican, one Democrat, and the press asks the question, but not one question while I was listening was asked about energy. I find that amazing because here we are with $80 oil. Is it a new floor?

My chart, which goes through 2006, has this up as high $60, but we're clear up here in the $80s. Most people were very concerned that $60 and $70 oil would put us into recession, but when you look at the constant increase in the last 5, 6 years of oil prices just skyrocketing and no stopping, and the scary part on oil is that historically in the world marketplace we had slush. I mean, we had extra oil. There were 10, 12, 15 million barrels of oil that were available to be produced daily if we needed them. I'm told today that we're lucky between 1 million and 2 million barrels a day is available if we have a crisis.

So, if we would have a storm in the gulf that could take a few million barrels off the market and you had one of our Third World countries that ship a lot of oil have a governmental problem or a terroristic attack one of their sending stations or their pipeline systems, then we could lose 4, 5, 6 million barrels of oil a day. You would see prices at $100 very quickly. $100 oil will have a severe crisis in this country.

We now have $7.50 gas. It's going up weekly now. The season is here. We're through the soft season, and much of the gas in the ground for this year's storage was put in at much higher prices than that. Then you have the storage costs and the distribution costs, and we're talking about a sizeable increase in natural gas prices this year.

As I was showing you the oil chart, oil prices continue to spike, and yet we hear nothing from Congress. We don't hear questions and much discussion in the Presidential campaigns, and I find that confounding because energy, reasonable, affordable energy, is why America is what it is today.

Natural gas prices, you know for a long time natural gas prices were around $2 or less, and then we had spikes, and then we came back down. And now we are on the same path as oil. We're right up here about here now, $7.50. That's out-of-the-ground price. That's not the price you and I pay at home or the companies pay. Pipeline charges, storage charges, distribution costs, I mean it's clear up in here, $12, $13 gas when it gets to us as a consumer.

But the price out of the ground, this is the price out of the ground that we start at. We're up here. We will be soon approaching $8, and that will continue to rise as heating season comes and industry continues to use.

Well, why is this? Why is America having this constant skyrocketing prices in energy? Well, here's one of the reasons.

About 26 years ago, the President of the United States and two Presidents since and Congress both put moratoriums on producing offshore. That's called our Outer Continental Shelf. The States control the first three miles, and then the United States Government controls the next 197 miles to 200.

Now, the only place we've historically produced is right here. 40 percent

of our energy has come from this little area, and last year we opened another small area down here that will be helpful, but will certainly not solve our problem.

So America is the only country in the world that has locked up its best oil and gas reserves that cannot be produced. Countries like Canada don't do that. Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, all environmentally sensitive countries, they all produce out here. Everybody's given kudos to South America, to Brazil for being one of the first countries that is now energy independent, and everybody thinks it's their ethanol. Ethanol was a part of it, but they opened up their Outer Continental Shelf. They produce out here.

There's tremendous gas reserves around Florida. There's tremendous gas reserves up and down the coast and oil reserves. Now, there are those who are afraid. The last oil spill we had offshore was at Santa Barbara in 1969. That's a long time ago, and we've never had a natural gas spill and we never will because natural gas escapes into the air.

Now, we could also put some huge blocks in here of where we, the government, have locked up some of our best reserves in the West, and for some reason, we, being one of the largest users of energy in the world, have decided that we're not going to produce it. So we're very much the reason, because of those charts that I showed you previously are just going almost straight up.

Now, we do have energy bills in the House and the Senate, and they will be considered at some point in time. They're not scheduled yet. They were supposed to be on the floor now, but they've not been scheduled yet but we think they will be. The only problem is, as you see at the top of my chart, we call them the No Energy Bill because they don't produce energy.

They lock up 9 trillion cubic feet of America's natural gas. It cuts off production from the Rome plateau, a huge clean natural gas field in Colorado that was once set aside as the naval oil shale reserve in 1912 because of its rich energy resources. This means that 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, more than all the natural gas from the OCS bill passed last Congress in the gulf, the Rome plateau has already gone through NEPA, that's all the environmental assessments, and is ready to lease. This position was not in the original Resources Committee bill and was added without any public hearings or very much debate on the House floor.

It also locks up 18 percent of Federal onshore production because it requires redundant environmental studies. I authored an amendment in the 2005 energy bill that was very helpful. Those who were opposed to us producing energy in America, and there's lots of those, all the environmental groups that had decided that we shouldn't produce fossil fuels, that they're just not a part of our future, even though later I'll show you they almost have to be, this bill that we passed took away the redundant use of NEPA. NEPA's an environmental assessment that has to be done before we do much of anything.

What they did was this is akin to doing an environmental review for a parking lot with one car and then requiring a second environmental review for a second car in the lot. It makes companies who have leased land do an environmental assessment for the overall outlay or overlay of a proposal to where they're going to drill and produce. Then it does another environmental assessment for the roads they're going to build. Then it does another environmental assessment for every well they drill. These are many, many months long, sometimes yearlong proposals that have to be developed on how the environment's going to do.

So the use of redundant NEPAs was a way of just stalling and stopping production, and we were pleased when we got that legislation passed in 2005, because in the West there were people who had leased land for 6 and 7 years and never been able to produce it. So we were able to help them.

This bill locks up 2 trillion barrels of American oil from the Western oil shale. The bill stops the leasing program for oil shale reserves on Federal land that hold enough oil supply for the United States for 228 years. This is more oil than the entire world has used since oil was discovered at Drake Well in my home district nearly 150 years ago and over twice as much oil as the entire OPEC cartel holds.

Meanwhile, China's developing their shale oil. Now we're in the process of developing how to get that oil released. It's like similar to Canada's tar sand oil. They've worked at that for a decade or more, and today they're producing 1.3 million barrels of oil just above the American border.

A lot of that oil is coming down here to be refined, thank the good Lord and thank Canada. But they are at 1.3 million barrels, and they hope to be at 3 to 3.5 million barrels at some point in time, but they have developed the ability to release that oil from the tar sands. It has been known to be there, and that is very similar to our shale oil.

Are we learning how to do it? Are we continuing to start and get some pilot projects going? No. The legislation before us will take it off the charts.

Well, we go on down here, it locks up 10 billion barrels of oil from the National Petroleum Reserve. Again, that's in Alaska. This bill will make it much harder to produce energy from Alaska's national oil reserve that was set aside in 1923 for energy for this country.

It has only recently begun to be explored starting with leases issued by the Clinton administration. Under current law, the Department of Interior can extend the time of a lessee who might have begun to produce energy without fear of losing his lease.

Producing oil offshore is a complicated, expensive process. Sometimes if they have a lease of a certain period of time and they don't get their leasing done as quickly as they would like to, maybe for many reasons, caused by government, then they want to take away the right to renew that lease and extend it. Again, it would take that amount of oil, 10 million barrels, away from the marketplace.

Then we go down to breaking legitimate offshore energy contracts. We have contracts that were given for the deep water oil. We have companies that have spent $2 billion producing energy out in the deep water, I mean, way out there several, many miles deep, very expensive, very costly, and they have not yet made a profit.

But there are those who think they should be paying royalty, even though they are not making a profit, and want to, with legislation in those contracts, or prevent them from having contracts again. That's not exactly how the American economic system works, but there are many here in Congress who want to confiscate those leases, even though they were legitimately given by the Clinton administration.

It also inflicts a $15 million tax increase on American oil and gas companies. Why would we do that?

Well, there are those here who hate oil companies. A few years ago, Congress lowered the corporate tax rate for all manufacturers and processors, and that included oil producers and manufacturers. This no energy bill singles out the oil and gas industry, hiking their tax rate back up to 35 from 32 percent. So my refinery in Bradford, Pennsylvania in my district and my refinery in Warren, Pennsylvania, United in Warren, Pennsylvania, will pay 3 percent more corporate taxes than all the manufacturers and processors around them.

Will that help us to have more energy in America? No. Will it make it more expensive to produce American energy? Yes. Does it make sense in the big, long-term of energy production for America? Of course it doesn't.

Now, the next one down here, all the legislation ignores alternative energy like coal-to-liquids. It seems like coal has been shut out by many. Coal cannot be a part of our future, according to many, but we are the Saudi Arabia of coal.

The future of coal is not just using it to make electricity by burning it, but making liquids from it. During World War II, Germany was blockaded. They didn't have oil, so they made oil out of coal, and the Fischer-Tropsch method was one of them. There are several others now, but we need to, in this country, in my opinion, we need to be force-feeding some coal plants that are making liquid fuels, diesel and gasoline and jet fuel, out of coal.

We also need to be making natural gas out of coal. We need to have those plants online, refining that process so it can be cost-effective, because these plants cost from $2- to $3 billion apiece for just a medium-sized plant, a very heavy capital investment. They need some incentives, some loan guarantees, some help, to get these plants up and running to make sure that that's an alternative.

Why do we want to do that? We need to have as much energy available to Americans as we can get, all kinds of energy. We will get into that in a moment.

The more alternatives we have and the better supply we have, the more affordable the price will be. Today, those first charts I showed you with the prices skyrocketing, it's because we have a shortage of almost every kind of energy. So we believe that it's very important that we have coal-to-liquid.

Also, on the last one here, we raise false expectations by mandating that we have 15 percent renewables used, that's called the renewable standard, to make electricity. Now, I wish we could make 15 percent of our electricity from renewables. We are currently, on an average, nationally, at 3. Some States and some plants are doing better than that, but they have resources and the ability in their area to do that.

Not every part of the country can do wind and can do solar. The sun doesn't shine often enough or the wind doesn't below regularly enough. Those are very specific areas where you can do that. And other places just don't have the renewable fuels that could be used.

We think the Federal standard of 15 percent will force companies into making electricity in very expensive ways and will skyrocket electric prices, especially in areas where you just don't have access to renewables. We believe the 2007 energy bills that are currently in the Senate and the House are no energy bills.

Now, there are some good conservation measures in there. There are some things in there that will stimulate renewables. But there is no energy there. It limits gas, it takes away oil, it has nothing for coal, and it makes it much more difficult to produce in existing fields.

Now, let's look at where we are at in the country today. Energy in America, these are 2005 charts, we still have them from the Energy Department but they haven't changed very much in the last year and a half. Forty percent of our energy is petroleum. That's oil. Twenty- three percent is natural gas. Twenty-three percent is coal. Now, this has been a growing figure, because 12 years ago, we took the lid off and we allowed an unlimited amount of natural gas to be used to make electricity. We use to limit that, that it could only be used for peak power, and so a very small amount was used. But now a lot of natural gas is used for electricity. In fact, about 20 percent of our electric comes from natural gas. Nuclear has remained 8. The only reason it has remained 8 as electric use has went up is because we've squeezed more production out of our old plants than they were designed for. We have been upgrading them and working them overtime.

These plants are producing more electricity, but the bad news is that we need 35 new plants online by 2020 to stay at 8 percent. That's going to be a big job for America. So that means if we don't do that, we are going to have to substitute something else for the nuclear that's not going to grow maybe that fast. We have 35 companies with permits now, it takes 4 years to design them, 4 years to build them and with delays, that's at least a decade.

So if we don't have those online by 2020, then we will be looking at other ways to make more electricity that we are not making out of nuclear. Then we have hydroelectric. There is no growth here. This is a shrinking figure because actually we have the environmental groups that want to tear out the dams we have. They want nothing to do with damming up a waterway and using that to make electricity, so that's a figure that will continue to decline.

Now, biomass is the one that has been growing. That's wood waste. It's being used to make pellets to heat our homes. We have pellet stoves and pellet furnaces. That's the new fuel, so that's using waste wood, sawdust and trimmings that are ground up and made into pellets.

Now, biomass is also being used as topping the load on electric plants that are using coal. Because to meet air quality standards, if they use 80 percent coal and 20 percent wood waste, they can sometimes meet the air standards, depending on the coal they are burning that day. So wood waste is an add-on. Wood waste is going to be used down the road making ethanol, we believe.

But biomass is the one that's growing. We also, in the wooded areas, like my district is a big timber district, we're using wood waste to heat all of our dry kilns now that we use to dry our wood. We use to use natural gas and fuel oil for that. I shouldn't say all, but many. Because of the prices of natural gas and fuel oil, you can't hardly afford to use it anymore for that purpose. Many of the small factories where they process wood, they use the waste to heat the factory. So biomass is sort of finding its own market, especially in the areas where you have strong supplies of it.

Now, geothermal is a very good form of energy, but it's a costly investment. It's where you either drill into the water table, and then when you pump that up into your system, you take heat out of it in the wintertime, or you take coolness out of it in the summertime and send it back cooler or hotter.

Another way to do it is to put a big loop pipe system in your property. Then you get it below the frost line, where it stays at 54 degrees all the time, and you take heat out of it in the wintertime, and you take coolness out of it in the summertime. You will use a fair amount of electricity with that because there are a lot of pumps, but this has been a pretty affordable type of energy, and it's renewable. You use some amount of electricity, but not as much as you would in direct electric heat.

Now, wind and solar are the ones that we are putting an awful lot of pressure on, and everybody is talking about. Wind also has its opponents. We had a bill proposed this year by the Resources Committee that actually stated that if you found a dead bird or bat at the foot of a windmill, it was a criminal offense. Now, that language has been removed, but somebody believed that, and I also serve on a committee where one of the gentleman there raises the issue there all the time with the Fish and Wildlife Service, why they are not arresting windmill operators where they find endangered species birds or bats at the foot of the windmill, that that should be a criminal offense. I have heard that argument each year now for a number of years. It has its opponents. I am not one of them. But wind has limited application. When the wind doesn't blow, you have to have a redundant supply. That takes us back up to natural gas, because natural gas is the generation where you can turn the plant off and on quickly. That's why we historically used it for peak power in the morning and night, when we're running our factories and we are using a lot at home, that's when the greatest demand for electricity was and that's when we turned on the gas generators. When the wind doesn't blow, you turn on the gas generator. When the sun doesn't shine and you don't have solar coming, you turn on the gas generator.

Now, what I think the American people and too many Members of Congress don't understand is how small they are. Wind currently is 0.12 of a percent. Solar is 0.06 of a percent. Let's say we could double them every 3 years. This would be 0.24, and this would be 0.12. Let's say 3 more years we double it again, and then we would be 0.48 and 0.24. We are still a very small fraction and now we are already 6 years down the road. And, you know, to get to 1 percent would take decades.

So we have to realize, as good as these are, and as much as we want them to be a part of our energy supply, they are limited in the ability they can produce. So those are the facts sometimes that sort of get lost.

Now, another issue I want to mention is the new issue here, the issue that's getting a lot more attention here in this House and in the Senate is climate change. Climate change is the fear that the use of fossil fuels and putting CO2 into the air is harming our environment and causing the surface of the Earth to warm.

Now, there are many scientists that don't agree with that. I know the sun

scientist from MIT doesn't agree with that. She has a pretty strong history where when the sun hits us directly, we warm for a decade or so. Then when the sun is hitting us a glancing blow, we cool. But there are those today that are convinced that it's CO2. That's what we breathe out. We breathe out CO2 and we breathe in the oxygen. The plants take in CO2 and they process oxygen that we breathe. It's that even exchange. But there are those who feel that we have too much CO2 in the air and are really wanting to treat CO2 as a pollutant, and they are really somewhat being successful with that, which I think is going to be harmful.

Now, I am not saying we shouldn't be observing it, I am not saying we shouldn't be working on how to sequester carbon as we use fuels, that we shouldn't be working on all those things, but I look for us to put on measures that will raise energy prices up to 30 percent or more because of having to deal with the carbon issue. The carbon issue makes it very difficult for coal to participate, and that's what we own the most of. And it makes it very difficult for petroleum. That's what we don't have a lot of but we use a lot of for our transportation system.

Then when that happens, we will be putting great pressure on natural gas, because it has no NOX or SOx, very clean burning, and it has a third of the CO2 of any other fossil fuel. It will move to gas if we force companies to measure how much CO2 they are putting into the air, and it will decimate certain industries. We probably won't make lime and cement in this country. I guess what worries me is when we don't manufacture anything in America.

The current natural gas prices have caused us to lose 50 percent of the fertilizer industry in the last 2 years. The petrochemical industry is in the process of building all their new plants offshore, where natural gas is a fraction. That's another point I want to make is most Americans are not aware that our natural gas prices are the highest in the world.

How is that? Well, it's not a world price. When oil has been $80, and that's a scary figure to me, and nobody is talking about it now. It's just kind of like, well, it's $80, but natural gas prices, when we have $80 oil the whole world has $80 oil, so competitively it keeps us even.

But when natural gas prices are two, three, four, five times higher here than in other countries, it gives those countries a huge advantage. I have been promoting that we must, as a first priority, open up natural gas.

Before I go to that, I just want to mention, here is the chart that shows us our oil imports as we continue to become dependent on foreign, unstable countries.

And we're up here right now. This is of course old data. And we're up here right now at 66, and we're going up 2 percent a year and we'll soon be at 70 percent.

Now, is that bad? Well, a decade or so ago, when oil was much cheaper, you know, over in the 30, 20 range, and back here when it was below 20, and I remember when it was back here at 10. Now, these are the average prices per year. So during this period of time we've had $10 oil a number of times. But then in the year average, so this chart is the annual average price, so it doesn't show the $10 level. But when oil was 20 and $30 a barrel, it was much more affordable. And a lot of people said, well, we should be using their oil and saving ours. Well, we did that. Well, when you get up here to where you're at $80 oil, it seems to me that that's pretty concerning. And how do we compete as a country when we have $80 oil ongoingly and could have spikes from that?

Now, we believe that, I want to go back to this chart here. We believe it's time to open up the OCS. And our proposal opens it up for natural gas only. It's a bill that we now have 165 cosponsors of. It's called the NEED Act. And it also sets aside funds for a lot of very good purposes. But it would open up both of our coastlines and the rest of the gulf for natural gas production only.

Now, the States currently control 3 miles. We're prepared to give them, with this legislation, 50 miles. And they could open that if they chose to, but they would have to pass a law asking for it to be open. The next 50 miles would be open automatically, but they have the right, within 12 months, to pass a bill to say they don't want to produce. So we have States' rights for up to 100 miles, where now they just have it out to 3 miles. Then the second hundred miles would just be purely open.

So we believe that making natural gas available and stabilizing natural gas prices, we can preserve the petrochemical industry in this country, we can preserve the polymers and plastic industry in this country, we can keep what steel and aluminum manufacturing and bending and shaping companies we have left.

I predict that if we don't stabilize natural gas prices for home heating, for business heating, and for production of products, we will be making bricks and glass in nearby South America where gas is a buck and a quarter, when our average retail price will be 11 or $12. Those companies will go there and save millions of dollars in energy costs, and they can ship those bulky products like bricks and glass to us in a boat in a day or two. Not very far down here to South America.

We have enough competition with China and India. Their natural gas prices are way lower than ours, maybe a third of ours, and so they have not only the cheap labor advantage, we're giving them an energy advantage.

And I guess the part that I've struggled with in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, is it seems like Americans are just immune to the impacts of high energy prices. Now, this winter, as I started, when we start heating our homes, we will feel pain. The poorest among us will struggle to heat their homes this winter, especially when they live in older housing that's not as tight, doesn't have the new windows.

I found it interesting this year, I'll just step on a sidebar here for a minute. The Speaker of the House wanted us to have a less carbon imprint for the Capitol, and so she's mandated that we switch from using less coal to heat the Capitol complex and more natural gas. Well, that costs us an extra $3 million because gas is much more expensive, and it sets a precedent out there to all of our local governments and State governments and all the other departments of government that they ought to do the same. And I see universities doing it now, switching to clean natural gas, spending more money.

But what we didn't do is this building and all the buildings we work in still have single-pane windows that let the heat out or the cold in. It would seem to me that the first thing we should have done was to put modern windows in our buildings to keep the heat in and keep the cold out, because there's a huge difference between a single-pane window and a triple-pane window, whether it keeps the heat in and the cold out or the cool in in the summer time and the heat out. So windows should have been our first measure. But no, we're putting in the little curly-cue light bulbs in all our offices now, by mandate, by law. I'm not opposed to them. I have some in my house. But they unfortunately are all made in China. They're not made in this country. And so that's another part; we are mandating China products to light our facilities around here. And we're now forcing natural gas to be used instead of coal, which will cost us more but will send a precedent around the world. And if everybody, if all the governments do that, all the agencies do that, all the educational facilities do that, we'll put tremendous pressure on natural gas.

Now, our natural gas bills, I explained that and I'll just explain it again. The first 50 miles will be controlled by the State, only produced there if they pass a bill and ask to be opened up. The second 50 miles will be open, but the States have a right to close it with legislation if they can pass it and their Governor signs it, the second hundred miles would be open for natural gas only, not oil.

Now, we also have some things that we think are pretty important in this bill. And as you look there, we're going to give $150 billion of the royalties to the States. That's an incentive. So as they produce in all the coastal States, they will then have the ability to have some of those monies for their reserves, and we think that's important.

Then we have $100 billion for the government. The Federal Government will

get $100 billion utilizing the resource on the Outer Continental Shelf over a period of years. And we're going to have $32 billion set aside for energy research and production, real money, not a few $100 million, but billions of dollars to do the essential research and develop the renewables that can help us in the future. And $32 billion set aside in a fund for carbon capture and sequestration research. That's what we're talking about today. Not talking about it. We would get affordable energy for Americans to heat our homes and run our businesses, and we'd get $32 billion over a period of time to figure out how to deal with the CO2 issue, if that's our number one problem.

Now, I think affordable energy is a far bigger problem than CO2. I know the pain that's going to be felt in this country for the home heating costs and the small business costs, but the job losses as we, and we have the potential of losing millions of jobs in America, more going to foreign countries because of our energy prices. That's the concern, because when the working man loses his chance to make a living, how does he afford to heat his home? How does he afford to have a home?

Now, we have some areas that have been wanting cleanup money for a long time, and the first one here is the Chesapeake Bay. They've wanted $20 billion, and their proposal says they need $19 billion to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, and the State's put a little bit of money, the Feds put in a little every year, but it's kind of trickling in. This would provide them over a period of time the money they need to clean up the Chesapeake Bay.

Great Lakes, the need, their studies have all shown, their organization's the same. They need $20 billion to clean up the Great Lakes. Well, this bill would provide them with the $20 billion to clean up the Great Lakes.

Then the Everglades. You know, we've been putting money in the Everglades every year. Well, this would give them $12 billion for Everglade restoration.

We've been talking about the Colorado River Basin restoration. Well, this would give them $12 billion for restoring the Colorado River Basin.

And the San Francisco Bay restoration. This would give them $12 billion for the San Francisco Bay.

Now, the issue that I always find confounding here, every year we give more and more money for LIHEAP and weatherization, and rightfully so, because the reason America has the highest energy costs in the world is Congress and the administrations that have been running our government, both parties, we have not, either party, adequately went after energy. I think my party is more on the right track than the other party, but neither party has done what we need, and that's why we're in trouble today.

And then when we're in trouble and it costs so much to heat our homes, we have to help the poor. We also have to save energy by helping the poor weatherize their homes, because they don't have the money to spend to save money. So we put $10 billion into LIHEAP and weatherization to help Americans to heat their homes.

I'm going to go back to the first chart here. World oil prices. Here we are, as I started, we're now clear up here, clear up off the chart, $80. All week long, in fact, it's been as high as $83. Have we heard much about it on television? No. Hardly mentioned. Do we hear about it in the Presidential debates? No. Has it been any special meetings here in Congress? No. Has there been any discussion in the last few weeks about the energy bills that are languishing to be considered and need to be conferenced? No. It's like it doesn't matter.

Mr. Speaker, it does matter. $80 oil. I've talked to experts in Federal agencies that have dealt with energy all their life. They told me in a private meeting that they thought $60 to $70 oil for a long period of time, or for, you know, a decent period of time would stall our economy. And then we hit $70 oil for quite a while, and then it got up around $75, and it still hasn't stalled our economy. And they said they know we're getting close to that price point. They don't know where it's at, but they don't think it's far away. And folks, when that happens, it takes a long time to come back, because here's the problem.

As we go back to the big chart that I had, I want to put it back up here. The problem that we have with energy, to open up the Outer Continental Shelf to get gas, and then maybe at some point oil on out, it's 10 years from the day you pass a bill till you have any quantity of energy. If we do new nuclear, from the day you put some new incentives in or figure out some ways to entice companies to invest or government helps invest, you're 10 years away from production. Everything we're doing, and we don't know when. We hope it's soon, but we don't know when wind and solar will be a real mark on the chart, will be percentages of our energy portfolio. There are people who think we are right up there. They've been saying that for a decade. And nobody's holding them back. They're highly subsidized.

I haven't talked about ethanol. Ethanol is the one that's happening with petroleum. You know, we now use 6.3 billion gallons of ethanol this year. There's almost as many plants in production being built as there are in production, that in a year or two will double our ethanol. And that's from corn. The price of corn has gotten high. Now, our food prices are rising, and the cost of making ethanol's very high. It's almost an energy swap. I'm not against it because it's American made, but there is some danger in putting too much of your portfolio when you're using food to make your fuel.

And the cost, what do we use to make ethanol? Natural gas. Huge amounts of natural gas. If we can break the hydrogen link, what do we use to make hydrogen? We use natural gas. Biodiesel, we use natural gas and soybeans. Ethanol, natural gas and corn. Natural gas is the one, the only one that gives us hope. It can be a bridge. Natural gas could replace a third of our auto fleet and really cut back our need for oil. But there's no push to do that. It would burn cleaner. The only problem with natural gas in vehicles is you can't drive as far. You can't have a big tank. But all your short-haul vehicles, all your taxicabs, all your small engines, all your local tractors, a lot of your construction vehicles that are nearby and can be fueled up every night, they could all be on natural gas. That's an exchange of carburetion. Our current engines will burn natural gas. And so natural gas, if it was more affordable, if we got out on the Outer Continental Shelf and produced it and we had lots of it, it's our hope till renewables grow to where they can really help us.

My concern is there's no sense of urgency here. Congress does not have a sense of urgency. The White House does not have a sense of urgency. Where do we get our oil? Eighty percent of the oil today is owned by governments, not companies, Third World countries, very few democratic governments, dictators, unstable governments, they not only own the oil, they're producing it. And when government produces, it's never efficient. It's like Mexico.

Mexico is loaded with energy. We actually export some gas and oil to Mexico because they just can't get out of their own way. Their government is so inefficient and so ineffective, they can't get it out of the ground and get it refined. They actually buy some from us.

The most energy we buy from any one country is Canada. Thank God, to the north of us, if Canada really produces gas and oil and they are reaching into the new fields with the oil sands and so forth, they're moving. They are an environmentally sensitive country, but they are moving forward with their energy production. And, fortunately, we benefit from that.

But to the south of us, 80 percent of the oil is owned by unstable countries. They not only own it, they're producing it, they're refining it, and they're marketing it. And what they are doing that is very troublesome is they are skimming off the profits, instead of putting it back into the business, and using it for all their social programs and for people to live wealthy life-styles, and their energy patches are often a mess. Many of them have kicked out Big Oil. Big Oil has been chased out of country after country. Their investments have been captured. I could name a whole lot of them, Nigeria, El Salvador, Russia. Country after country has nationalized their energy, chased the big boys out that actually had the expertise, and

are now running their own refineries. We have 80 percent of our oil coming from countries that are not run like a business. And they are not democracies. They are not efficient. And so the supply of petroleum could decrease quickly if two or three of those countries get in any kind of trouble or would have any kind of an explosion in their major pipelines or refineries or sending stations.

Terrorism is a threat to energy. Terrorists could put this country in serious straits with little explosives in the right places. It's a scary world.

I guess the part that bothers me tonight is as we approach this season, this heating season for America, Congress ought to have on its agenda that we are going to provide affordable energy for Americans by producing adequate amounts of energy so we can bring the prices down.

Prices aren't set by big oil companies. Everyone blames them. Prices are set by the stock market. And every day they bid on what the price of natural gas is going to be, what the price of oil is going to be, what the price of fuel oil is going to be, what the price of kerosene is going to be. Those are all set by traders on the market. And if it shows there's a little shortage, they run the price up, and that helps add to the price. Fear of a shortage.

Well, we know there is an upcoming shortage of oil and gas in America. And we also know that we are doing very little. China is building a coal power plant every 5 days. They are building a nuclear plant every month. They are building the largest hydrodams known in America. They are buying up oil and gas reserves from countries whom we have historically purchased from. And I'm not going to be surprised when we pick up the paper one of these days and we read where one of the major countries that America has been buying a lot of oil from, that China has bought their whole supply. They are going to be producing oil 50 miles off the Florida coast in companionship with Cuba.

Mr. Speaker, America needs to wake Congress up. We need to wake Congress up. We need to wake this administration up. We need to have a sense of urgency that America produces the energy we need. We are still 86 percent fossil fuel, 8 percent nuclear, and 6 percent renewables, and biomass and hydroelectric are more than 5. And that leaves geothermal, wind, and solar, less than 1 percent, and 83 percent of that is geothermal.

America needs to understand the concern that is out there about having available, affordable energy. We have always taken it for granted. It is no longer going to just happen. America needs to be debating an energy policy that will bring oil and gas prices down; will take advantage of using clean coal technology, coal to liquids, coal to gas; expanding the use of clean nuclear; no CO2; looking harder at hydroelectric; continuing to grow biomass, geothermal, wind and solar, ethanol and biodiesel as fast as we can. We can't do it quick enough, Mr. Speaker. America needs to put the pedal to the metal. We need to produce energy for Americans so they can afford to heat their homes and we can afford to run our businesses so Americans can have jobs to support their families.

Mr. Speaker, it is September 27. We are just finishing the first week of fall. It doesn't seem possible, Mr. Speaker, that summer has slipped by. We are now entering the fall season. That means the cool nights and chilly days will soon be coming. The northern part of the country has already had a couple of movements of Canadian air down where we have chilly nights. That will soon cover most of the country. That means the heating season will begin.

The question I ask is this: Is America ready for the most expensive heating season that we may have ever faced? Yes, all of the last week, the first week of fall, we have had $82 oil. In fact, at the close today it was just 12 cents, it would have been $83 oil. I remember when $50 oil caused a panic, and $60 oil was going to be the end of all, and then $70 oil, and this week we have had $82 oil all week. I haven't heard many people talk about it because that price hasn't hit us yet. It hasn't hit the pump yet. It hasn't hit home heating costs yet.

But $82 oil will give us the highest home heating oil prices we have ever had. It will also give us very high propane costs to heat our homes. Now, 60-some percent of our homes are heated with natural gas. The current price of natural gas, which is at the low ebb because of the summer low usage, is at $7 today. That will soon be rising as we get into the fall season and gas consumption increases. This year, all of the gas distribution companies are warning their customers that they will pay from 9 to 15 to 20 percent more this year than last. That is only on a prediction, because that depends if we have no storms in the gulf or no major supplier of gas that goes offline. A storm in the gulf, and we have not had one that really damaged the gulf now all of last year and all of this year, would give us $90 to $95 oil quickly, could give us $12 to $15 gas quickly. Then we would have real pain in America, not only for those that are heating their homes, but the ones that buy this energy every day of the week, every week of the year, the manufacturers and the processors in America that run our plants: the steel mills, the aluminum mills, the chemical plants, the fertilizer plants, those who process our goods, those who bake our bread, those who cook our foods. I was talking to Hershey Foods today about the energy they use to roast the peanuts and melt the chocolate and make the candy. Energy is consumed in every process of life.

What has this Congress, in the few months we have been here, what have we accomplished to stabilize energy prices? I am just going to turn this chart over because that simplifies what we have not accomplished, because we haven't accomplished anything. There has not been one bill passed. There has been nothing changed. But we have been stirring around doing things.

I want to ask you tonight, Mr. Speaker, are the things we have been doing productive and helpful? Will they help Americans heat their homes and drive their cars with affordable energy? Well, the legislation that has been approved by this body, and I believe the Senate, removes 9 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Roan Plateau that was permitted. All the NEPA studies were done. All the environmental assessments were done. It was ready to be drilled. This legislation takes 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas off the market.

This legislation also locks up the oil shale reserves in the West. What are the oil shale reserves? Well, some think it is the largest reserve of oil in the world. We still haven't figured out how to unlock it from the shale rock. But to the north of us, we have the tar sands that are very similar. It is going to take a lot of energy and a lot of heat to warm it up and get it out of there. I was talking to a Canadian company this morning, and in Canada they are now producing about 1.5 million barrels per day of tar sand oil. Their goal in a year or 2 is to be at 3 or 4 million. They have been working on that for a long time, because it was a process that they needed to develop and that they needed to refine. They needed to figure out how to make it work.

Now, it seems that we down here in the States ought to be working just as diligently on the shale oil reserves so that we would be energy independent. The lady from Ohio was just talking about dependence. What we are talking about is the issues I am talking about here. Taking the 9 trillion cubic feet away, taking the shale reserves out, will make America not less dependent, but much more dependent on unstable foreign countries.

I don't understand the lack of urgency in this body. We have not had an urgency in this body since I have been here that I think is adequate, because America does not realize that $82 oil might almost be a plateau upon which we can have spikes. If we have a storm in the gulf, it will spike. If we have a major sender of oil or a country we are getting a lot of oil from has any trouble with their government or any instability there or any kind of explosion in a pipeline or a loading dock, we can have $100 oil. And we know then we would be looking at maybe $3.75 to $4 gasoline. We currently don't have $3 gasoline in most of the country, some parts, but we soon will have, because $82 oil will be more than $3 gasoline when it catches up in the pipeline.

The legislation we have before us is making it very difficult to produce in the Alaskan National Petroleum Reserve that was set aside a long time ago. The rules are being changed. They are making it harder to permit. They are making it harder to produce there. That is a $10 million oil reserve.

Then this one is the one that surprises me. I know a lot of Members of Congress hate oil companies, hate big oil. But we passed legislation here in the Senate, it is not law yet, thank God, that increases the taxation on anybody who produces energy and processes energy by 5 percent. So any company that produces energy in America will pay a 5- percent higher corporate income tax than anybody who manufacturers anything else. Now I don't know why we would do that. I know they want to get at the five big oil companies, but probably 75 to 80 percent of the production is not by big oil. They are the processors. They are the refiners. They are the marketers. But there is company after company that are investing billions in America and billions around the world to produce energy that are not big oil. They don't market oil. They drill and produce and move and transport petroleum and other products to the marketplace. Well, we are causing them to pay these taxes.

I have two refineries in my district still. One is a Penn grade crude refinery, American Refiners in Bradford, about 10,000 barrels a day, just a small refinery. They are going to pay 5 percent more corporate taxes than any other business in Bradford, Pennsylvania. Is that fair? No. That is not fair. What will that do? That will make energy more expensive, not less expensive. It will not encourage people to produce in this country. It will encourage them to produce in other countries so they don't have to pay it.

United Refinery in Warren, Pennsylvania, that gets Canadian crude, gets it under the lake; it comes under the lake in a pipeline. It is a very good refinery. It has been growing about 70,000 barrels a day now. It is a company that I am very proud of and have worked with for years. They are going to pay 5 percent more corporate taxes now if this becomes law. That will make it more expensive for them to produce the gasoline and fuel oil for our people. Who will pay that? The consumers. We will pay that.

Also, the language that we have been working on, I was fortunate in the energy act in 2005 to put an amendment in that took away redundant NEPAs. Now, NEPA is a study. It is an environmental assessment that is very important that we do before we do anything on public land. Well, those who oppose the production of energy, and that is a lot of people in America, who don't want us to drill for oil, who don't want us to drill for gas, who don't want us to dig for coal, don't want us to use fossil fuels, and don't want nuclear, so they fight it. They fight it in the courts.

They use processes to make it difficult. I had people telling me in the West they had leased 6, 7 years prior and were still unable to drill a hole in the ground and bring any oil or gas up. It was because they were being caused to do a NEPA study for every step in the process.

Now, a NEPA study is a complete environmental assessment, and it's appropriate. But should you do five or six NEPA studies before you can drill for gas or oil? I don't think so. I don't think that is fair. That is just about delay. That is not about environmental protection. That is to prevent the production of energy.

I don't understand, because when you look at the chart, and let's look at it, we are using 40 percent petroleum, and currently 66 percent of that comes from, as the gentlewoman from Ohio said, foreign, unstable non-democratic governments that you really can't depend on.

Natural gas is 23 percent of our energy. That is the one that has been increasing. About 12 years ago we took away the moratorium on using natural gas to make electricity, and now 21 percent of our natural gas makes electricity. We now, for the sixth year in the row, have had the highest natural gas prices in the world. That has been a serious problem for business and industry, our job creators.

Dow Chemical, the largest chemical company in the world, in 2002 used $9

billion worth of natural gas. That seems like an incredible figure. Four years later, in 2006, they spent $22 billion. That's $9 billion in 2002, $22 billion in 2006. In four years, $22 billion, because the price of natural gas had spiked in this country, higher than Europe, higher than all our competitors, five to six times higher than South America.

Natural gas prices have been one of the biggest drags on the American economy, because we use it to melt steel, we use it to bend steel, we use it to make aluminum, we use it to make ethanol, we use it to make hydrogen, we use it to heat our homes. In the petrochemical business, which Dow Chemical is in, they use it as an ingredient. Fertilizer, it's an ingredient; plastic products, it's an ingredient; polymers, it's an ingredient.

So natural gas is not only a fuel, but it's an ingredient. The face creams that we all like, the skin softeners that keep our face and hands soft, that is a direct product from natural gas. Natural gas is the finest product known to man to make things with.

Then we have coal. The bulk of that is used to make electricity. I had a gentleman ask me the other day, how are we coming on coal to liquids, coal to gas?

Well, we are not. In World War II, Germany fought us with liquids made from coal. It was called the Fischer-Tropes process. We have paid many universities in this country and researchers to come up with other ways. There are numerous ways now to make liquids. We could make jet fuel, we could make gasoline, we could make diesel out of coal. We have not refined it and we have not made it cost effective, but we know how to do it. We can make natural gas out of coal. But there is such an anti-coal sentiment in America, because it produces carbon in the air.

I said to the person, there have been groups in the Senate and there have been groups in the House trying to put pilot projects or some way of helping push the ball down the road for coal to liquid and coal to gas so that we can be less dependent on foreign oil, but not one of those has even come close to having a vote to get in any of the energy packages that are moving.

We have clean coal technology to make electricity out of coal. It's much cleaner than the old processes. But there are those who think today they probably couldn't build one of those plants because there is such opposition. Though we are the Saudi Arabia of coal, it's kind of sitting on the sidelines.

Eight percent of our energy comes from nuclear. Since the Energy Act of 2005, thirty-some companies have put in plans and requests for permitting of new nuclear facilities, and I think all on existing sites, expansion of current plants and new plants. In fact, I see the other day that the first two permits to come in to build a completely new reactor, not just additions, have come in.

But the 35 permits we have in process, I am told by the industry that by 2020 we need them all to just keep nuclear at 8 percent of our electric generation, because our electric use is rising so fast that we need to grow nuclear or nuclear won't be 8 percent; it may be 7 percent, then 6\1/2\ percent.

Hydroelectricity is not growing. Clean energy, no pollution, but there's great opposition. You couldn't build a dam in this country today; that is not allowed. So hydroelectric is just where it's at, and that percentage will continue to shrink. As the use of electric goes up, this will go down to 2.5, 2.3, 2 percent. We have lots of dams in this country that have not been harnessed, and there's been a real resistance.

The only good news on the chart is biomass, which is wood waste and things, pellet stoves, people heating their home from pellets. You have factories heating in the woods where we have lots of forests and mills where we process wood. They use it to heat the boilers to heat the factory. They use it to top off some of the coal plants, which allows them to meet air standards. It may be 80 percent coal and 20 percent wood waste. Biomass has been growing. Of course, down the road we hope to get into cellulosic ethanol. I will talk about that a little later.

Geothermal is a very good form of energy, but a very small percentage. We use that by using the ground temperature, whether we drill into wells and use the well water, or whether we put a loop system in deep enough that you have the ground temperature and you take heat out in the wintertime and take cold out in the summertime to cool your home or heat your home. But that is a very expensive investment and is usually done in new construction, and it is pretty disruptive to do it in an existing neighborhood.

Wind and solar are the two sexy ones. They get a lot of talk, and there are a lot of things going on there. But we see the percentage. If we double these percentages, even if we triple these percentages, we are not to 1 percent. These are very small numbers.

We all like them because they are clean. I shouldn't say ``we'' all like them. We had a bill introduced this year that was introduced in the Resources Committee that said if a bird was found at the foot of a windmill, it was going to be a criminal offense. I think that language was removed in the bill that moved. But that shows you that someone is not very pro-wind, because birds and bats will occasionally get in that path and hit those blades.

But these two, what the problem is, when the wind doesn't blow, we have to have a natural gas generator to turn on. That is what we do. Then solar, when the sun doesn't shine, we have to have a natural gas generator to turn on. When you add these up, wind and solar and geothermal, you are less than 1 percent of the overall energy mix. No matter how much we increase them, they are a fraction. It will be a long time before they are real numbers.

So what does that mean? That means whether we like fossil fuels or not, we must have more petroleum, we must have more gas, we must have more coal, we must grow nuclear, we should be growing hydroelectric. Biomass is the only one that is really showing much growth.

But I want to tell you, the environmental groups in America that are running energy policy, and certainly today in this House, are anti- petroleum, because you drill a hole in the ground. They are anti- natural gas. I don't understand that one, because natural gas is a clean gas. There is no nitric oxide. There is no sulfuric acid. There is one-third of the CO2, if you are concerned about CO2. It is really the green field.

In my view, the only way we will survive or prevent a crisis in America on energy is if we really pull the stops up and open up every natural gas field we can until we can develop some of the renewables, until we can find other sources of energy.

We have ethanol. Ethanol now, in 2006 we produced 5 billion gallons. This year, we are at 6 billion gallons. So we are growing. Our ethanol is made out of corn. Brazil's was made out of sugar cane. That was cheaper to make.

To make ethanol out of corn, you have two processes. You have to take the starch and turn it to sugar. Then you ferment the sugar and make the ethanol that you use as a fuel. So it is a dual process. Ninety- five percent of all these plants are fueled with natural gas. So we need natural gas for that.

Natural gas, like I said, is the only fuel that can really prevent this. We have a lot of petroleum being produced in this country, but we can never be self-sufficient. People who think we are going to be independent are just talking.

Natural gas, we can be self-sufficient, we can keep moderate prices. We can expand natural gas use in our auto fleet and save a lot of oil with natural gas, in my view. But natural gas is looked at just like oil. You have got to drill a hole in the ground, and you must not do that.

In my opinion, from the administration on down, there are really no strong proponents of coal. There are Members of Congress that are strong proponents, but certainly far from a majority. And I don't look for any progress on coal. I don't look for any progress on petroleum. I have not given up on natural gas, and I will talk about my bill in a moment, because we believe that natural gas is our only hope of diverting an energy crisis in America.

What do I mean by an energy crisis? I mean oil prices where we cannot afford to compete. The problem we have today, Americans are struggling, the poorer Americans are struggling, by the time they heat their homes this winter, drive their cars, to have adequate funds left for health care and

food and all the other substantives of life. Energy prices are going to make it very difficult on the poor in this country as they continue to rise. But even worse, and I know people don't care as much about companies, but companies and businesses who are employing us, they make up the payrolls. They give people a chance to make a living.

We have the highest natural gas prices in the world; and when our companies are paying the highest prices for the fuel they use to make products, then they are not competitive in the world marketplace.

We have lost more jobs in America than we can count. We blame it on trade agreements; we blame it on lots of other things. But the last 6 to 7 years, natural gas prices were between $1.77 and $2 for years, we had a couple of spikes in the seventies and eighties, and then the climb started. Then came Katrina. Now we are up in the $7 and $8 figure. With a storm in the gulf, we could be back up to $14 or $15 again, because as we enter the heating season, we are at the low ebb of the year, about $7 per thousand, but a lot the gas that is in the ground for this year's use, we paid $8, $9 and $10, because we put gas in storage all for the winter usage. I don't know what the average price is coming out, but most of the utilities have told us 9 to 20 percent more for heating a home with natural gas this year, depending on which utility you are on, when they bought their gas or how they bought their gas.

So we are looking at a measurable increase. We are looking at a real spike in fuel home heating prices, because $82 oil will be the most expensive home heating prices we have ever had. Propane comes from both, so propane will be somewhere in the mix. It is always more than natural gas. So the cost of heating our homes this year will be very important.

Now, let's bring up the chart on what we think is the solution, the best thing we can do.

Here is a picture of this country. You could also have some great big blobs in here where we have locked up huge resources of natural gas and coal and oil that are on public land, because in the West, the vast majority of the land is owned by the Federal Government.

But where we are different than any other country in the world is we have chosen to lock up our Outer Continental Shelf. What is the Outer Continental Shelf? Well, Mr. Speaker, that is from 3 miles offshore to 200 miles offshore. Every country in the world produces a lot of their oil and gas out there, because it is very prevalent.

Now, we produce in just a small piece in the gulf, and we get 40 percent of our energy from there. This small area down here is what keeps America alive. Otherwise, we would be importing 80 to 90 percent of our oil from foreign countries.

I just find it amazing that we have chosen as a country that we are just not going to produce more. Maybe 10 years ago when gas was $2 a thousand and oil was $10 a barrel, it may have been a smart argument, let's buy theirs while it is cheap and save ours for when it is expensive.

Well, we are still saving ours. We have $82 oil. We are still saving ours. I think if we had $90 oil next month, we would still be saving ours. I have been here awhile. We have been trying to open up this for a number of years. We had a successful bill last year, but we didn't have success in the Senate. But it makes no public policy sense to not be producing oil and gas off our Outer Continental Shelf.

It is the safest with the least environmental impact. The sight line from shore is about 11 miles, so when you are past that, you can't see it. The commotion caused from a drilling rig, a thousand drilling rigs, is less than one storm as far as turmoil on the ocean floor. And there hasn't been a major spill of oil except for the one in Santa Barbara in 1969.

The technology of today is when a storm comes or there is a problem, the valve of the rig on the ocean floor is electronically turned off. When we had the tremendous storms in the gulf several years ago, we had very little spillage because when the storm was coming, they turned off the valves. If the platforms move, the rig is ruined, nothing happens. We have always had more spillage in the ocean from hauling oil in tankers than from wells. But we don't prohibit tankers because then we wouldn't have any oil.

I don't understand why we are financing all of these countries in the world by being dependent on them. They are not our friends. They were the ones that sent those here on 9/11, but we are funding them with these huge oil costs and we just plain will not use our own. There is no good reason why we couldn't be producing a lot more of our own energy, totally self-sufficient in gas, stable prices and competing with the world with all our manufacturing. We can help oil prices in the world by supply, but we cannot dictate them because we are not that big a player unless we learn how to use our shale oil down the road, and then we could say good-bye to the foreign imports.

But it seems to me that we ought to be opening up the OCS. That is the simplest. And my proposal is pretty simple. We are just going to open it up for natural gas. We are going to say the first 50 miles, that is up to the States. Only if the State wants to open it, can they. We are not opening it.

The second 50 miles would be open for natural gas only, but a State would still have the ability to say no. They could pass a law in their State and say Congress, we don't want this open. Then it would be protected for 100 miles.

For the second 100 miles, our bill would open gas. I would like to be opening oil out there, too, because that is so far out, there is just not an environmental problem. But we are just asking for gas because we think gas is more of a crisis than oil because we are going to lose more jobs in this country because of the highest natural gas prices in the world.

Mr. Speaker, $80 oil is pretty painful, but it is painful to the whole world. That is the world price. When we have gas that is twice and three times and four times what competing countries are at, we are at a disadvantage.

We have lost half of our fertilizer industry in the last 2 years because of natural gas prices. We are losing our petrochemical industry. Those are some of the best jobs left in America. We are going to be losing our polymer and plastic jobs because of natural gas prices. It just seems to me that we really, really need to change our attitude in this country and say let's be more independent.

Those who tell you we can be independent are not being honest with you. I don't know of any way we can be independent. We will also always be dependent on foreign energy in our lifetime. Maybe some day with new forms of energy or new ways of powering vehicles and new ways of lighting and heating our homes, if we can do that, some day we might be. But all of the things that we are working on are still on the margins. We want to grow them all. We want to move them as fast as we can. We want all of the renewables that we can get. But those who tell you that renewables will take care of even the growth in energy needs are not being honest with you. And those who say that renewables displace oil and gas and coal needs in this country are not being honest with you because they just can't.

We need to have the OCS opened up. We need to promote all of the renewables we can. The President is promoting cellulosic ethanol. We are at 6 billion gallons of ethanol, and they want to get to 35. That is a big jump. I don't know whether we can get there. They want not to just be corn. And I noticed today corn prices are approaching $4 a bushel again. When we started making ethanol, corn was less than $2. Nobody knows where it is going to be when we go through another season because there are a lot of ethanol plants being built. We will have a lot more capacity a year from now to make ethanol.

There are problems with ethanol. It takes a lot of energy to make it. I am not opposed, but it costs a lot to make it. And one of the problems is that ethanol cannot be put in a pipeline system where the vast majority of our energy is put out to the stations. We have to blend it at the station or blend it at the distributorship and haul it in tankers because it has a corrosiveness to it. So unless we change all of the pipelines in the country, ethanol has a serious problem that we have not been able to overcome yet. We have to haul it separately and then blend it at the station

in a tank. So it has a distribution problem.

The President wants to do cellulosic ethanol which will be from any kind of waste material. It could be from wood waste when you ferment it to make it. Or it could be from garbage, which seems to make some sense. It could be from things like switchgrass and cornstalks and any kind of cellulose, cellulosic ethanol.

The problem is that it is still in the laboratory. We think we have about got it to where we can make it. They are funding six plants which are going to be experimental. I am for that, but I think we should be doing the same thing simultaneously with coal. Taking every process we have to make liquids from coal and refining it, improving it so we can do it in volume down the road. Coal to gas and coal to liquid, every measure we know, we ought to be refining those and getting those to where they will help us to be independent.

And we should be continuing to promote nuclear. The nuclear we have on the drawing boards will keep us from losing percentage. It will not help us grow, but we need to figure out, and that may be one of the biggest mistakes we made, if we are really concerned about CO2, we certainly should be for nuclear power plants.

But we need to be doing all of these, Mr. Speaker. We need the OCS open. We need that clean, green natural gas, affordable and available to heat our homes, run our businesses, and manufacture products so we can compete in the world marketplace. We need clean, green natural gas as well as cellulosic ethanol, as well as all of the renewables, as well as coal to liquids, as well as coal to gas, and as well as clean coal technology and more nuclear plants.

A lot of our competitors, like China and India, they are buying up reserves of oil and gas all over the world. They are building coal plants, coal-to-liquid plants. They are building hydrodams. They are building every form of energy there is at breakneck speed. We as a country are sitting here on our hands twiddling our thumbs, actually today moving in the direction of less available energy, which will make us more costly and more foreign dependent.

The legislation that we have before us, if it becomes law, I think will speed up, and we have been gaining in dependence on foreign oil about 2 percent a year for the last 10 years. I think we will speed it up to 3 to 4 percent a year if we go down to the road of taxing oil more, of taking major plateaus and major reserves off the table, refusing to open up the OCS, our dependence will grow. When you are at 66, you don't have to go very far to where you're three-fourths, and then you are 80 percent and the rest of the world will just plain own us because they today, OPEC today sets the price of oil. Five years ago they didn't. They had lost their grip. But today, they set the price of oil.

Imports. This is not quite up to date. I am going to have to get a new chart with 2 more years on it. But we are back on a steady climb. I predict it won't be very long until we will be at 70. And if we pass the legislation that is before the House and do nothing else, do nothing to open up, do no OCS, do no Alaskan, and continue to take much of the Midwest out of the picture, continue to lock up more reserves, we will be 70 and climbing towards 75 at breakneck speed and America will be dependent for their total economy, for the ability to heat their homes and manufacture, on foreign, unstable nondemocratic countries who will actually and literally own us. That's not the America I want for my grandchildren and for your grandchildren. I want an America that has a sound energy policy that produces oil, produces gas, produces coal, moves into all of the renewables and does more on conservation.

I haven't talked about conservation, but prices are going to force us to conserve. There are many who want prices as high as we can get them so we will use less energy. Well, they are winning. And I am going to tell you, energy prices this winter will be the highest they have ever been, and we will be dependent on weather as to how high they go.

Major storms in the gulf, major cold weather where we consume a lot of heat, will set prices far higher than they are today. We are not in control. The weather and unstable parts of the world will dictate what America does for energy.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to talk about an issue that's not talked about enough in Washington, and on a warm sunny afternoon, where it's not real hot, it's not cold, not a lot of energy's being used. Not a lot of Americans are talking about energy, but it should be on the minds of Americans.

I was disappointed last night as we listened collectively to the Presidential debate. Now, the candidates don't get to talk about what they want to talk about unless they squeeze it in on the side. They get to answer the questions; and last night, not one question was asked about the energy future of America.

We've been a very successful Nation. We've been the leader of the world because we have had cheap, affordable energy. That has all changed. We now have expensive energy, and we have short supplies on every hand.

When I talk to the biggest employers in America, when I talk to the people that I know understand this country and the manufacture of goods and the process of goods and trade around the world, I say, should energy be a top issue? And they said, it is for us. To remain an employer in America, energy is our number one challenge.

Just to give you an example, Dow Chemical, the largest chemical company in the world, located in America, thousands of good jobs in America, their costs of energy went from $8 billion on natural gas alone in 5 years to $22 billion. That's almost tripling the costs of their major use of energy, natural gas.

Now, we have some energy bills moving, and we would hope that they would increase supply because when you increase supply, you decrease prices. A lot of us have struggled to understand the energy markets, but this is how I understand it in basic terms. They are not set by energy companies. They're set by Wall Street traders who look at availability of that form of energy, and they run the price up or down by the hour.

In the last few days, oil prices have been rising a dollar-something per day, and I checked about 1 o'clock and oil was approaching $77 a barrel, almost the highest price ever, and had been increasing hourly all week. So the price of energy is not set by the sellers of energy. It's set by the Wall Street traders on their view of the availability and the affordability.

Now, the bills before us, we'll look at them a little bit, I find somewhat disappointing. They cut off production from the Roan Plateau, a huge clean natural gas field in Colorado that was set aside as the Naval Oil Shale Reserve in 1976 because of its energy-rich resources. This means that nine trillion feet of natural gas, more than all the natural gas in the OCS bill that was passed last year, will be put off limits.

The Roan Plateau had already gone through all the NEPA studies. Now, those are yearlong studies that say whether it's environmentally appropriate to produce it. They passed that test.

This provision was not in the original Resources Committee bill and had been added at the request, we think, of leadership because it wasn't in the original bill. This bill will make it harder to produce energy from Alaska's natural petroleum reserve which was set aside in 1923 to help America meet our energy needs in the long term. Additions of tens of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas and millions and millions of barrels of oil in Alaska's natural petroleum reserve which would have increased the likelihood of the construction of the gas pipeline that could bring 4 to 6 billion cubic feet of clean green natural gas from Alaska every day has not yet been built.

The bill effectively repeals language that I put in the energy bill in 2005 that took out redundant NEPAs. NEPA is a comprehensive, complicated study that you have to go through to make your environmental assessments.

Now, what was happening in the West, where a lot of our energy is, NEPA studies were being used redundantly. In other words, you have a study for your original plot. You have a study for the road. Each of these studies takes a year. You have a study for each well location. You have a study for everything you were going to do. And so I had people who said they had leased land 6 and 7 years prior and still hadn't been able to drill a hole in the ground and produce the energy for America.

So we did a simple amendment that said you do a NEPA, you do it on all of those things collectively and you go ahead and proceed. Well, the bill we have moving now takes away those redundant NEPAs and allows them to go back to multiple NEPAs. The provision alone adds red tape that will stop 18 percent of the future on-shore natural gas production and oil and hurt those least able to pay their energy bill.

The bill doubles the time it takes to get government approval for offshore

energy projects at a time when China is drilling within 50 miles of our shore, along with Cuba.

Now, also, we have portfolio standards in the bill that says 15 percent of renewable energy must be a part of all electric production. Now, that's a great goal. I don't have any quarrel with the goal. But we mandated it by 2020, and some States with their natural resources can meet that, some can't.

We also, with the limit of what can be renewable energy, I know we already had the Pennsylvania law which used more items in their renewable portfolio package, and so the Federal one-size-fits-all mandate, we should have had a carrot approach, where we put a carrot out there, where we encourage, we assist, we help. But this mandate will make it very difficult for States who do not have the right sources of energy available to them because it will make it very difficult for them to produce electricity and meet that mandate.

We have an interesting issue in every appropriations bill this year that's a mandate that CFL light bulbs be used in every building. Now that sounds good. Those are highly energy-efficient light bulbs, the little ones my wife and I fight about because I bought them and put them in, and she takes them out because they buzz and make noise and don't give quite the quality of light we are used to with our incandescent bulbs. We have had that discussion ongoing, but we have mandated them in government buildings.

The sad part of the story is they are all made in China. We do not produce one in America.

The Senate had severe changes in CAFE standards in their bill, which I think would be part of the discussion when we have a conference committee, if we have a conference committee on energy. Many Members of the House, bipartisanly, are concerned that the mandates in the Senate bill will be harmful to the American auto industry.

That's another issue, that we need to have more fuel-efficient cars. Nobody argues, we need to. I think we may have been a little too easy on the auto industry in America, because it seems like every time we have an energy spike, they are never ready for it, and they lose a piece of the market share. Because Americans have chosen to purchase cars that were not fuel efficient, energy prices would go up, and we would buy more fuel-efficient cars, and energy prices would come down, and we would go back to buying high gas users again.

We need to have a more fuel-efficient auto available to us, and we need to use our energy as wisely and conservatively as possible. But hopefully, in the end, we will have a CAFE standard that will not disadvantage the American automakers.

Now, one that bothered me the most, I guess, was the $15 billion to $16 billion tax increase on energy production. Now, I know what that's about; it's about the hatred of the big oil companies and their big profits.

Well, someone said to me one day, well, how come they have made such profits? Big oil companies over the years purchase the ability and the rights to oil all over the world, including in our country. They purchase those rights, assuming that $25 or $30 would be the price they would receive for their oil.

Well, we don't have $25 or $30 oil anymore, and when you sell $75 oil and you were going to be profitable at $30 oil, you are going to make a lot of money. Why do we have high oil prices and energy prices in America? Because this government and this administration have not opened up energy supply.

When you don't open up energy supply and you help create a world shortage, you force prices up. It's the traders in Wall Street, again, who determine adequacy of natural gas or oil or other commodities to the marketplace.

Now, in oil, it gets quite confusing because you will have an oil price set by Wall Street and you will have a gasoline price that sometimes doesn't make any sense. This spring we had gasoline prices higher than they should have been, as a result of 60-some dollar oil, but it was because there was a shortage of gasoline in the world. Fifteen percent of our gasoline now comes from Europe, and when Europe didn't have the gasoline for us, we had a shortage on gasoline. So our gasoline market went higher than it normally would have.

So it's interesting that these Wall Street players run up the price because there is a shortage in the world.

I would be glad to yield to my clean natural gas friend from Hawaii.

That's correct.

Yes. The issue should be, the number one issue in the Presidential debate, how do we secure adequate affordable energy for America to compete in the global economy?

See, we have never had to compete before, but we have countries like China and India that are stocking up on energy, all kinds of energy, acquiring all kinds of access to energy, building all kinds of power plants and hydrodams and acquiring oil and gas rights around the world, and we are sort of here sitting on our hands saying we can do it with renewables.

Now, I am for all the renewables, all we can get of them, but they are growing very slowly, and there has not been the willingness in this Congress and in this administration to say how do we acquire adequate energy supply.

Yes.

That's absolutely correct. We produce about 83 percent of our own natural gas. We import a lot from Canada and about 2 percent of LNG, which is liquefied natural gas, from the same area as we get our oil from.

Natural gas is not a world price, and a lot of Members of Congress and a lot of people in America don't understand that. Oil is a world price. The gasoline prices can vary. That's a portion of the oil. If you have an excess of gasoline in your country or in Europe, their price drops; if you have a shortage, their price goes up the same as ours. They operate off of the Wall Street market, and their markets.

They have a partnership with Cuba 50 miles from our Florida coast, and we can't drill within 150 miles of the Florida coast. No, we can't drill off the Florida coast at all. It's all closed at the moment.

No, you are absolutely right. We as a country do not have an energy supply plan. We just are kind of riding along, I guess, hoping things will get better, but we do not have a plan. The gentleman from Hawaii is absolutely correct.

Absolutely. I have not talked to a CEO of a major corporation employer in America who either produces energy or uses a lot of energy like Dow Chemical, U.S. Steel, Pittsburgh, PPG, all the big users of energy, and I said to them, I believe that available, affordable energy equals terrorism and a challenge to America's future. They said, you are absolutely right. Every one of them.

I have never had a person in that kind of a position or people that have understood this issue and have worked on it all their life and understand it who didn't agree with that. But for some reason, they don't say it publicly. I have been one of the few, and my friend from Hawaii has been one of the few who have been willing to say, hey, clean, green, natural gas can be our renewable, our bridge to the future. We need to realize that we must produce it, more of it.

We will take a moment here and look at American energy production. We currently are 40 percent oil, 23 percent natural gas, 23 percent coal, 8 percent nuclear, 2.7 percent hydroelectric, 2.4 percent biomass, and that's woody waste materials, geothermal, wind and solar. I guess the thing that's concerning is this is where all of our emphasis is, and ethanol.

I haven't talked about ethanol, but one of the other things that's in the bills is a mandate of 35 billion barrels of ethanol, and we are currently producing 7 billion barrels, mostly from corn.

Now, corn has been controversial because corn has gotten expensive, $1.80 corn per bushel is now $3.50 a bushel, has been as high as $4 a bushel. I am not opposed to it. The manufacturing of ethanol, 95 percent of the plants that produce ethanol use a huge amount of natural gas.

In fact, ethanol is sort of a swap. Some say it's a winner by a little bit. There are those who say it actually takes more energy to make ethanol, but it's American, it has given our farmers a market for grain. But using the food supply has its long-term problems. If we would become huge ethanol producers much more than today and would have a short corn crop for a bad season, food prices have already increased measurably because hog farmers and beef farmers and poultry farmers now are paying much more for their feed to feed their animals because of corn prices, and also organizations that feed the poor around the world have always used American corn because it was so cheap and are now having to pay twice as much for it as they did before.

So using food for fuel is not, I am saying, bad, but it has its challenges. And the other problem with ethanol is that it's corrosive and cannot be put in our pipeline system. And the cheap way to move energy around the country is in pipelines. We can't use ethanol in the pipeline; we have to blend it on surface and either bring it in tankers blended or blend it at the station.

Now, ethanol has its limitations. We will kind of move into the next portion here and talk a little bit about ethanol and cellulosic ethanol. The amount of importation of oil, every year our dependence on foreign, unstable countries for petroleum increases about 2 percent. Every year, that's just constant. It just keeps going up.

The energy bill we have before us will put another spike out here because it's going to tax energy production. It's going to make major energy fields off limits, and so we will have to do more imports. So with the energy bills that are before us, we are going in the wrong direction as far as energy production.

Now, let me get the other chart there on foreign dependence, or the deficit, the trade deficit, huge percentage, $293 billion is the importation of oil.

Now, anything we can do to lessen dependence on foreign and the purchase of foreign oil helps the trade balance for America. It's a major portion. In fact, it's about a third of our trade imbalance. When the price goes up, this number expands very quickly.

We are at $76, almost $77 oil today. We have not had a major storm in the gulf. A major storm in the gulf can raise prices $10 to $20 a barrel in a day or two. Here is what happened when Katrina hit. That was Katrina. We have not had a storm in the gulf since Katrina.

When a major storm hits the gulf, why does it increase prices? It shuts down refineries, it shuts down pipelines, it shuts down the rigs. We stop producing for months because we have to go back in and repair the system that produces it, the pipeline systems, the cleaning systems, the refineries. All that has to be rebuilt because those storms are immense.

Last year was the first year in a long time we had a major storm in the gulf. This year we seem to be in a major series of storms right now. We have been lucky. The last two have been south of our gulf. There is one coming now that may hit the East Coast.

But when they hit the gulf with $75 oil, we could easily have $90 oil. That means gasoline pump prices of $3.50, $3.75. Also at the current time, here is where America is in trouble. We are dependent on no storms in the gulf for a stable price, or a high price, stable price without further spikes, and we are dependent on no country in the world that ships our oil, most of them are unstable governments, not having a governmental collapse or a takeover or a military coup where we lose millions of barrels of oil per day.

We have to pray, I guess, that we have good weather, that it doesn't interrupt the gulf and that we don't have a major country producing oil topple its local government.

Here is the problem. This is a picture of America. We produce a fair amount of energy in the middle. We could produce more, and we talked about some of that earlier, but we are the only country in the world that doesn't produce immense amounts of oil and gas offshore.

Every country in the world: Canada, Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, Australia. I mean, these are all green countries. These are countries with records of being environmentally sensitive.

Offshore is from 3 miles to 200 miles. That's controlled. The States control the first 3 miles. The next 197 miles is controlled by the Federal Government. We've had it locked up for 26 years. We've said, we don't need that. I disagree with that.

Now, we will have argument that, oh, we can't have clean beaches. All those countries have clean beaches. Oil and gas production today is not the threat to the environment it was many years ago. In fact, the last major oil spill offshore was in Santa Barbara in 1966, I believe. That's a long time ago.

And everybody talks about the ship, I can't think of the name of it now, the Valdez up in Alaska. That was a ship. In fact, everybody who knows offshore says that we're more in danger with ships hauling oil, which they do every day, than we are from producing it.

Now, what's been interesting here is I have promoted and many of my colleagues have promoted the production of clean green natural gas. They say, well, that will pollute our beaches. Well, there has never been a gas well that's ever polluted a beach.

In fact, 11 miles is the sight line, and if you go 25 miles offshore, nobody will ever see it, even from a tall building. It's out of sight. And clean green natural gas, it's a gas, and it bubbles into the air naturally from fissures in the ocean floor every day. And even on land, natural gas finds its way out of the reserves, through pressure and works its way.

In fact, I come from the original oil patch, Titusville, Pennsylvania, first oil well drilled by Colonel Drake. It was 68 feet deep. They drilled there, actually it was a dug well because they didn't have the drilling; I guess they couldn't get a driller to come in so they actually dug the well and lined the side with stone like you do a water well, and caught oil at 68 feet. Because oil had been oozing up out of the ground and that stream called Oil Creek had oil on it before we ever drilled an oil well because it naturally oozed out of the ground because that gas sand was very close to the surface,

and so they produced it there. And so I've been around it all my life.

And it's interesting that we've also had the argument on this floor and across the country that you just can't drill for natural gas. So we've been promoting just natural gas, hoping, because natural gas is our biggest need. Natural gas is what we heat 60 percent of our homes with, 70 percent of our businesses, and is a major ingredient in the production of fertilizer. Nitrogen fertilizer, 70 percent of the cost of making it is natural gas, and we have tripled the price in a very short period of time.

Petrochemicals, every chemical you buy at the hardware store, every chemical you buy at the grocery store is made with natural gas as an ingredient, 55 percent of the cost of petrochemicals, on average. So petrochemical companies in America are in trouble because we're paying more to make them than other countries.

Polymers and plastics, 45 percent of the cost of producing polymers and plastics is natural gas because it's used to heat and it's also used as an ingredient.

We all know that making steel and bending steel is a huge cost, and most of it's done with heating by natural gas. The furnaces are run by natural gas. So our steel industry has paid a tremendous price with natural gas, and will continue to pay a tremendous price.

In fact, the president of U.S. Steel told me a year or so ago, John, if you don't get a handle on natural gas prices, we won't have a steel industry in America. PPG Industries said the same: if you don't get a handle and stop this escalation of natural gas prices, we won't be in America.

And I'm sorry to say that if we don't get a handle on natural gas prices and stop the next peaks, where gas gets just unaffordable, we will be buying bricks and glass from South America, which has natural gas prices a fraction of ours, like $1.25 a thousand, when we are currently at about seven and many times on a winter's average it's about 12 to 13 when you pay retail price.

So Russia, China, India, all of our competitors have natural gas prices that are a fraction of ours. And so we believe that we need to produce clean green natural gas offshore.

And I'm pleased that a friend of mine from Virginia Beach, from Virginia, Thelma Drake, has come to join us on the floor; and we'd welcome her comments.

Let me just ask you a question: Weren't you surprised in the debate last night that the media didn't ask one energy question, as if energy is not an issue?

As we look at the chart that we have in front of us, it's called the NEED Act: $150 billion will go to producing States, with an incentive for them; $100 billion will go in the U.S. Treasury, $32 billion for renewable energy research. Now, that's real money for renewable energy research: $32 billion for carbon capture and sequestration research, which is the big issue of the day, unfortunately, getting more play than energy availability and affordability. And I'm going to say this: if carbon sequestration is a bigger issue in this Congress than energy availability and affordability, this country will not compete. We have to have available, affordable energy. And the advantage of clean natural gas is it has a fraction of the carbon of the other fossil fuels. It's the clean green fuel. It's about a third of the carbon of all the other fuels. So clean green natural gas. But it has to become affordable and stably priced.

For the Chesapeake Bay, $20 billion, $20 billion for the Great Lakes restoration, $12 billion for the Everglades, $12 billion for the Colorado River, $12 billion for the San Francisco Bay, and $10 billion with LIHEAP and weatherization. Weatherization of course is an important component there because it helps poor people make their homes energy efficient.

We're joined by the lady from Tennessee. We're delighted to have you with us today.

Reclaiming my time, it's interesting. Here I have a chart in front of me that I have not seen before but I found very interesting today. Twenty percent of our electricity now is produced by natural gas, and that has been the big user of natural gas that has really forced natural gas prices up because we changed that about 12 years ago. Prior to that you were not allowed to use natural gas to make electricity, only for peak power in the morning and evening when you have this surge. A gas generator you can turn off and on, but a coal plant you can't. A nuclear plant you can't.

But here is the current cost of electricity: Nuclear electricity costs $13.54 a megawatt hour. Coal costs $20.80 a megawatt hour. Natural gas, $49.51 a megawatt hour. Nonhydro, which would be wind and solar, costs $68 a megawatt hour. And the reason for that is that we all wish that wind and solar would produce a lot more energy than they do, but the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine, and when it doesn't shine and it doesn't blow, you have to have another system that you've paid for like a gas generator that you can turn on or turn off as the wind blows or doesn't blow and the sun shines or doesn't shine, because we have not yet been able in batteries to store this energy, or in some sort of a heat tank, to where we use it later. We have researched with billions of dollars and we will continue to research, but those are very expensive forms of electricity.

Yes. The cost for nuclear is $13.54, and there is a new nuclear. Coal, $20.80; natural gas, $49.51; and nonhydro, $68. Now, we need them all for the portfolio, but we have to have affordable, available energy or Americans won't have jobs. In my view, energy costs are the biggest job killer in America and have been this decade. We blame it on other things, but the cost of energy since it has spiked has stayed there, and we now are at a high plateau where future spikes are coming. We just need a storm, we just need a country to topple, and we'll have $100 oil. And we know $100 oil would be $4 or more for gasoline. We understand that.

I yield to the gentlewoman.

I thank the gentlewoman from Tennessee for her comments and for coming down and sharing today.

I think the number one issue we need in America is to have a strategy to open up the Outer Continental Shelf for natural gas first, and, further on out, hopefully down the road, oil, because we need both.

Natural gas, though, is a clean, green fuel that is low in carbon emissions. It's not a nitrous oxide problem. It's not a sulfuric acid problem. It's a clean, green fuel. And why we have not utilized it as the bridge I find hard to understand. We have had a presidential moratorium and a congressional moratorium for 26 years. The only country in the world to do that.

We talk a lot about Brazil's ethanol. Ethanol is part of their portfolio, but Brazil also opened up their Outer Continental Shelf and are now producing lots of natural gas and lots of oil offshore, so they are energy self-sufficient, with ethanol being a piece of it.

Now, they make their ethanol out of sugarcane, which is far less costly because we have a two-step process. We have to change the starch in corn to a sugar and then we change it to alcohol, which is the fuel. So we have a dual process, and it takes twice as much energy to do that. The production of ethanol is a high-energy consumer, probably as much energy as we produce, but it is trading foreign imports for American made, so I support it.

Now, the push at the White House has been for cellulosic ethanol, which I am in support of too, but it is still, unfortunately, in the test tube. The President was here on the floor talking about it last February, and a few days later I was told that he asked to go see a plant and, unfortunately, there wasn't one. He had to go to two laboratories to where it is being studied. And cellulosic ethanol will be made out of any plant life that is decaying. It could be garbage from our garbage stream. It could be grass like switch grass and other kinds of grass. It could be cornstocks or peapod waste or any kind of waste stream from our food supply, or it could be cellulose from wood, any kind of woody waste. And you then make alcohol as you ferment that. Now, hopefully, that is going to be more cost-effective and will not be competing with our food supply. And I commend the President for producing that, but I think we need to do a number of things.

First, we need to expand the conservation wise use of energy. If Americans were told up front where we are with energy availability and affordability, I think each and every American will do something to conserve and more wisely use energy. But I don't think Americans have been adequately informed. I think the press have been very negligent. But, of course, Congress and the White House have been negligent about talking about this issue. The press certainly have not had it on their agenda and have not often asked it in the presidential debates, and we hope that will change. We mustn't waste energy.

Recently here in the House we had an initiative that the Capitol complex would be less heated by coal and more by gas, and that was a carbon statement. That bothered me a little because if everybody in the country, if every government does that, all Federal agencies do that, State governments do that, universities, and some universities have already done that, if they all switch from coal to gas, we are going to put more pressure on natural gas and increase the shortage of natural gas and increase the price. What disappointed me was that was the first initiative to have a wiser energy use for Congress and the complex we house, all the buildings we work in. But every window in all of these buildings is still a single-pane, leaky window. Not one energy- efficient window has been put in. It seems like we ought to keep the heat in and the cold out before we change fuels.

We need to assist companies and individuals who use a lot of energy with using energy more wisely. That is a government educational process. We need to open up the OCS. We need to open up the Outer Continental Shelf for the production of energy, specifically natural gas. We need to open up more of Alaska and more of the West for oil production.

The President has funded six pilot plants for cellulosic ethanol. I have been urging them to fund six pilot plants that take coal and make liquid fuels. That is a German process. When we blockaded Germany during World War II, they made their fuel out of coal. The fissure tropes process, several other processes that have been developed in this country, there are ways to do that. You can make natural gas out of coal. But for some reason, there has been a reluctance in this Congress and a reluctance in this administration to use coal, our most abundant fuel, for liquids and for natural gas, thus lessening our dependence on foreign, unstable countries.

We need to figure how we speed up nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is safe. France is, I think, approaching 80 percent nuclear energy for their country, the production of electricity. We had a process here that took, I think, 10 years for a permit. We downsized that in the energy bill to 4 years to permit and 4 years to build, so we now have an 8-year process to build a nuclear plant.

One of the problems we're having is that many of the components that are needed in the energy plant have to be bought from foreign countries because in America we don't make the castings to make a nuclear power plant any longer. We're buying those from Japan. I'm told a lot of the other portions are coming from Germany. We no longer have the technology in-house. I find that scary.

We must expand the use of clean coal technology. We have the fluidized bed process that we use in Pennsylvania to burn waste coal, the dirtiest, nastiest coal, and burns it cleanly. And if you burn good coal with the fluidized bed process, and if you incentivize the building of new plants to replace the old plants, but it's almost impossible in America to permit a new coal plant. We have put coal off limits. So we're not going to use it for liquids, we're not going to use it to make gas and we're not going to use it to make electricity. And we're not going to open up the Outer Continental Shelf for oil.

Folks, we cannot conserve our way out of the energy crisis in America. We need to conserve. We need to use energy very wisely. But if we don't have an energy plan for available, affordable energy for America, I will guarantee you that within a decade, we will not be the superpower of the world; we will not be a front-runner nation. We will be a second-rate nation.

We have huge competitors today. America has never had Chinas and Indias nipping at their heels taking away business every day. Those companies have energy plants. They're building nuclear plants. They're building hydro plants, dams. They're building coal-to-liquid plants. They're doing it all. They're acquiring rights to oil fields that have historically been ours. They have a plan for energy availability and affordability.

Yes, Americans must conserve and use energy wisely. But Congress and this White House must have an energy policy that says we're going to have available, affordable energy. And in my view, at the front of the pack should be clean green natural gas. And our bill, the NEED Act, opens up the Outer Continental Shelf after 50 miles. We give the States control of the first 50. The second 50 will be open to natural gas only. And the States will have the right, with their legislature passing a bill to say they don't want it open. The second 100 miles will be open for natural gas only. That gives the States control of the first 100 miles for clean green natural gas. We think we ought to be producing more than that, but we're struggling to get clean green natural gas.

So we say offshore should be our first initiative. We should have coal-to-liquid plants being built online so we can

refine that process. We need to be promoting more nuclear. We need to have all the renewables that we can produce; but, unfortunately, there are only a little bit over a percentage today. And many people are holding that out as the answer. I wish that was the answer; I would be all for it. But those that are telling us that we can conserve and renewables will be our energy portfolio are not being honest with the American public.

Just to show you, just a few months ago a bill was introduced in this body that said, if a bird or a bat is found at the foot of a windmill, it would be a criminal act. And that same day I think the Wind Association, and God bless them, I'm for them, but they stated that we would be at 20 percent of the energy portfolio in a very short time, I think in 10 years. I wish that was true, but it's not true. We can't get there that quick. The wind only blows a portion of the time, and we have not been able to store the energy and keep it and use it later. It only blows part of the time. We have to have a redundant source, clean green natural gas, and a complete portfolio for America so we can have jobs in America, so Americans can heat their homes, run their businesses, and compete in the world economy. We can compete with anybody if we're given a fair shake; but we must have available, affordable energy if America is going to continue to be a leader of the world.

Mr. Chairman, I rise today to talk about the importance of the legislation we are considering. There's nothing more important to America's economy and security than affordable, available energy, and we are today looking at legislation that doesn't deal with that.

Here is our current use of energy: We are 40 percent dependent on petroleum. We are in world short supply at the moment. The oil companies are reporting they are most frightened today because of the lack of oil availability in the world than they have ever remembered. Natural gas, 23 percent. Coal, 23 percent. Nuclear, 8 percent. Hydroelectric, 2.7 percent.

None of these major forms of energy will be enhanced or helped. They will be harmed. The legislation coming from the Natural Resources Committee will give us less petroleum and increase our dependence on foreign supply from unstable parts of the world.

Natural gas? Nothing. But it will give us less natural gas and make us, again, foreign dependent on foreign, from Canada.

Nothing to help coal.

We need an energy bill that gives us energy so our renewables can grow in order to meet some of our future needs.

Small business is the future of America. One of the greatest threats to small business in this country is energy prices, the transportation of their goods and the heating of their factories and the use of clean green natural gas in the manufacturing process. It is 55 percent of the chemical business; it is 45 percent of the polymers and plastics business. They use it as an ingredient; they use it as a fuel. It is 70 percent of nitrogen fertilizer. And one-half of our corn is going to be grown this year with fertilizer from foreign countries because natural gas prices in America are the highest in the world.

The natural gas supply in this country is in crisis. Twelve years ago, we opened it up for an unlimited amount of producing electricity. Now 20-some percent of our electricity is made with natural gas. But we refuse as a country, we refuse as a Congress to open up the Outer Continental Shelf where we have an abundant supply.

How many countries do what we do? There is no one in the world that doesn't produce energy, both gas and oil, on their Outer Continental Shelf. We all talk about Brazil's energy independence. Yes, ethanol was a piece; but they opened up their Outer Continental Shelf.

There has never been a gas well that polluted a beach. There has never been a gas well that polluted anything. Clean green natural gas should be a part of this bill; one-third of the CO2, no NOX, no SOX. It is a clean energy. And as a country, we refuse to use it. How blind can we be?

It is interesting in this bill, we talked about carbon in the last segment. The other two carbon free, we are doing nothing with hydro, we are doing nothing with nuclear, carbon free. I am for all these renewables, but they are a fraction. Twelve hundredths of 1 percent of our energy is wind; and if we double it, we are now 24/100ths of 1 percent.

Folks, I am for all of those, but clean green natural gas is our bridge to get to those. Open it up.

Mr. Chairman, I rise not to oppose the amendment but to make some comments.

I find this amendment interesting as someone interested in natural gas and the use of it. I find it a little puzzling because clean green natural gas is America's cleanest fossil fuel. Yet we've made it very expensive because we've allowed it to be used unlimited on production of electricity. I think the last 98 percent of plants built to make electricity are using natural gas. But what we're saying with this amendment and what has been lobbied for in the industry is that we will say to gas distribution companies that sell to our homes and to our businesses, we'll urge you to conserve but we'll charge you enough more that the gas utility continues its current profit structure.

I find that a little troubling, personally. I think it might be wiser to open up the supply of natural gas, get the price down so we're not the highest in the world, so people can heat their homes and run their businesses without having natural gas prices be prohibitive and, thus, the companies would be actually selling more gas and we wouldn't have to go down the road of subsidizing their profits because they're selling less volume.

As a businessman all my life, I understand the dilemma they're in. As people conserve and when energy prices spike in the winter, people keep their homes at 56. Businesses turn their thermostats down. I went to stores last year in Pennsylvania where they were actually cold. And I knew people who lived in 56-degree houses. I'm not sure we ought to go down that road. I think we ought to produce abundant natural gas and allow the price to work, cheap natural gas. The volume would be there, but we're glad to accept the amendment.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Would the gentleman yield just for a moment?

As a retailer all my life, that's what a gas company is. They're a retailer. I sold food. They sell gas. And as their business decreases, their profits go down, but their pipeline system, their pumping stations and all of their costs remain the same. My hesitation is with the cleanest energy we have, why do we want to restrict the use of it, because there's no NOX, no SOX and a third of the CO2. It seems like we ought to be more focused on making it affordable so that volumes remain constant and we don't have this problem.

Again, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I want to commend the gentleman for this amendment.

I'm from Pennsylvania. It's cold there. We have a lot of poor people, a lot of low-income people in my district, and weatherization is a huge program. I would just like to let the body know that in my Outer Continental Shelf natural gas bill, we set aside, I think, $12 billion to fund this program. If we open up the OCS for clean green natural gas, we will have an ongoing supply of $12 billion for helping with weatherization.

Mr. Chairman, I rise to say that we will be glad to accept the amendment, but I would like to make a comment.

Yes.

While I do that, I think it's a very important issue as we make our schools energy efficient.

Energy efficient buildings have very little air exchange. And if you have any kind of a pollution factor in your house or in a school or in a building that is just airtight, it's going to concentrate very fast. And it's very important that we have this kind of a study.

But I want to say that we won't have that problem with this building that we're in right now. We won't have that problem with any of our office buildings because they all have single pane, the least energy efficient windows known in America, and we have lots of air exchange. In fact, it's probably what we ought to be doing to make our own buildings energy efficient, instead of going to expensive natural gas to heat them, which will go right out those energy open windows.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the chairman of the committee for yielding me this time.

Currently, 3 percent of the grid is renewables. I wish there was a quick way we could turn the switch on and get to 15 in this short period of time. Such a mandate will raise power rates for many. A Federal RPS will undermine the existing programs in 25 States. Nowhere will this be more harmful than in Pennsylvania where we allow 20 different sources of energy to meet our 12 percent RPS.

Folks, wind and solar are our hope and dreams, but they are very, very small. And when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, we have a redundant source of energy for them, and that is natural gas, which has become the most expensive source of electricity today because we have been unwilling to produce it.

We will cause States that don't have what they need to pay much higher rates, and we will not have the growth and increase of renewable electricity that we want. We have 50 States. Incentivize all of them to go out and meet these standards, but don't do a Federal mandate. It will work some places; it will cause harm in other places. Let the 50 States determine.

Mr. Chairman, this is a complex issue, and I wish we had more time to really debate it, but it is a very important issue because this language was in the energy bill because we had problems across this country around our centers where a lot of electricity is used.

New York is the biggest user of electricity, but if we do this, we're saying that we have enough. If surrounding States such as Pennsylvania, an energy exporting State, took the same attitude, New York would be in the dark. Indeed, more reasonable New Yorkers realize this as demonstrated by the following statement from Mr. Gil Quiniones, Chair of the New York Energy Policy Task Force: ``The designation of vitally needed transmission corridors will enhance the public welfare both in the Nation at large and in New York City as the Nation's most critical financial and commercial center.''

Join me in defeating this amendment. This is scare tactics. These are very limited powers that are used already on gas transmission lines. They've not been abused, but when we have disagreements between States and we have local groups who are just anti everything in energy, we need the ability to get electric and gas to our cities so they can function.

Mr. Speaker, Americans are concerned, and they should be. We had $79 oil this week, $7 natural gas, the highest prices in the world, especially for natural gas. Oil prices are predicted to go to $100 this year with what's going on in the world.

America needs to use its resources. Canada, Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia use their resources on the Outer Continental Shelf. This bill opens it up from 100 on out. It's the safest place, the least imprint. It's the safest place to produce energy in the world.

Everybody in the country laughs at us when I talk to them about why we don't produce there. If we want to have a petrochemical business left in America, a polymer, plastics, fertilizer, steel, aluminum, bricks and glass, if we want jobs for our working people, we need affordable oil. We need affordable natural gas.

We have to stop being 2 percent more dependent every year. Every year we're gaining 2 percent in dependence on foreign oil. This has to stop.

We need to open up the Outer Continental Shelf.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 30 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, August 2, 2007, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, tonight I'd like to share with the House what I think is the most important issue facing this country. Later this week we will have an energy bill, or a so-called energy bill, because the number one issue facing America, in my view, is available, affordable energy.

First, I'd like to look at my chart on my left here, and this is the energy as we utilized it in 2005. It has not changed much in 2006. It changed very little in 2007.

The number one form of energy that we use is oil, 40 percent.

The second item is natural gas, 23 percent. Now, natural gas is used to heat our homes, to heat our businesses. It's used by many people. Many people are not aware that it's used in making many goods. Petrochemicals use it as a fuel and use it as an ingredient. Fertilizer uses it as a fuel and as an ingredient and so does polymers and plastics. In fact, most of the man-made materials today have natural gas in them as an ingredient, and they also use natural gas as a fuel to make the product. Plus, we also now generate more than 20 percent of our electricity with natural gas. So natural gas is the one that's been growing in use but not in production.

Coal is an equal amount which we use a lot to generate electricity mostly, 23 percent, heat a few factories. Nuclear, again to generate electricity. Hydroelectric, again to generate electricity.

Biomass is the one that's been growing. Nobody talks much about it. But it's woody waste, it's used in the pellet industry for pellet stoves to heat our homes. It's one of the new uses of wood waste made out of saw dust. Also, biomass is used in power generation. It is used to top coal loads so that they bring the air standards down because it burns cleaner, and many factories are now using waste pallets and waste wood to heat their factories because it's a cheap fuel.

Geothermal is one that's growing slowly. It's usually with new construction, not old, because of the underground work that's needed to use geothermal to heat your home or business.

Wind and solar are the ones we hear a lot about. Hydrogen is not even on here, but hydrogen vehicles is another one I should mention.

But this shows you, and I guess the part that is worrisome is that all of our energy bill deals with the last four: biomass, geothermal, wind and solar, or hydrogen.

The numbers in them are so small. We are all for them. The energy bill also does some good things. It does deal with conservation, wiser use of all of our forms of energy, better CAFE standards, although I am not sure that's in the bill, although there is talk about that being there, use, getting more fuel efficient cars.

But there's a lot of things in this bill that are very alarming. I believe that our 66 percent dependence on foreign oil will increase under the proposed legislation, because this bill goes in the wrong direction. Today, oil reached $79 a barrel, closed at $78.77, record high. I talked to some energy people this evening at a dinner, and they would be surprised if it doesn't reach $100 this summer or this fall.

Everything is in place. There is a world shortage of oil. We are not producing as much as we should be, and the tremendous consumption by countries like China and India and all the developing nations are now using huge amounts of oil. They are roaming around the world, signing up contracts, while we sort of sit along the sidelines dealing with the lower four.

The Wall Street Journal yesterday reports that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries posted record revenues of 650 billion last year on high crude prices and increased oil production, 650 billion, many of those our dollars.

Another move to use energy as a political weapon, Russia announced today that it's cutting off Belarus off from its natural gas supply. At the same time, Russia is trying to annex the North Pole in a very controversial move, contravention of international law, to feed its energy lust.

Yesterday, it was announced that Venezuela has joined China, Norway, Canada and Spain to produce energy right off the Florida coast.

The Iranians and the Chinese are inking new energy production agreements with Venezuela. Dow Chemical just announced that it's going to build a $22 billion chemical facility in Saudi Arabia because natural gas supplies in this country are too tight, energy prices are too high.

What most people don't realize is that natural gas is not a world price. We had $78 oil today. The whole world does. We have had the highest natural gas prices in America of the whole world for 6 years, and that has endangered the financial stability of chemical companies and fertilizer companies and plastic and polymer companies and steel and aluminum and bricks and glass that use huge amounts of natural gas to make them.

Recently, the Business Roundtable, which represents 160 CEOs of the leading companies in America that use energy, 4.5 trillion in annual revenues, with 10 million employees, wrote in a letter recently, ``None of the House [energy] bills addresses the critical need to increase domestic supplies of petroleum liquids and natural gas. Energy security means having well diversified sources of energy--not putting all of our eggs in one basket. Alternative fuels will not eliminate the need for traditional energy resources and, without additional supply, the tight market conditions that have put pressure on prices are likely to persist. The result may well be greater reliance on imports,'' and there are many who predict that we have been increasing our dependence, 2 percent every year. Some think we will spurt up to 70 real quickly, because of the energy bill.

The result, the unnecessary and counterproductive impediments to oil and gas leasing, on Federal lands, contained in this bill, report by the Natural Resources Committee, will have an immediate negative effect on domestic production and should not be adopted by the House.

It will cut off 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from the Colorado Roan. It will cut off 2 trillion barrels of oil shale from oil shale resources. It will cut off 18 percent in Federal on-shore production, because it is removing the redundant NEPAs.

Currently, we have off limits the Outer Continental Shelf, and this little spot in the middle here is the new Colorado Roan Plateau. It's a huge, clean natural gas field in Colorado that was set aside as the Naval Oil Shell Reserves in 1912 because of its rich energy resources. There is more natural gas there than was in the bill that was passed last year in the gulf.

Cutting off the Roan Plateau was not the subject of any hearings, markups, and was done at the 11th hour. It also cuts off 2 trillion barrels of oil shale from oil reserves in some of the similar areas there, 2 trillion barrels. Now, that's the largest oil reserve known left. Like coal oil shale may prove to be our key to hundreds of years of energy security. This bill throws the key away by neutering the current oil shale program. Meanwhile, China is developing its oil shale.

The NEPA program, NEPA studies, redundant NEPA study was legislation that I helped to get in the energy bill which says that redundant NEPAs are not necessary. Historically, groups who are trying to prevent drilling from happening would force producers into multiple NEPA studies, a NEPA study, an environmental impact statement. Many times before they were allowed to drill a well, they would have done three, four or five of them, each taking a year.

I had talked to people who had leased land, and 7 years later had not produced any oil. That will not serve America well. The bill we are going to be considering cuts off 10 billion barrels from the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. This is an interesting one, cuts off interagency communication for oil and gas permitting.

Historically, all of the agencies, when they were permitting oil and gas, like Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, EPA, Fish and Wildlife Service, Army Corps of Engineers, would all work together in their permitting process and would all work together collectively in enforcing them. This legislation says they must all deal with the person separately, which makes it much more difficult to produce energy.

I want to next bring up the next chart here. Total net U.S. petroleum imports. Prior to this energy bill, I believe it was called energy independence. Folks, the legislation we are going to consider this week will increase energy dependence. It will give us no independence.

This shows you the study path of dependence. Many of us predict this bill put another spike here because it locks up good reserves, and it takes away what opportunities we have.

It's vital to America that we produce fossil fuels.

In my view, we ought to be opening up the Outer Continental Shelf, and I will talk about that in a minute, which is, for natural gas, I have a bill to do that, and I will talk about it in a few minutes. But we also ought to have a program promoting coal to liquids, because the Germans fought us in the war when we blockaded them and prevented them from buying energy, any oil. They made their energy out of coal. Their processes are still known.

There are several processes that have been developed, but these processes need to be streamlined. We need to build some pilot plants. We need to make sure that in the future we are not growing our dependence to 70 and 80 percent on foreign countries.

Interestingly enough, the Air Force is doing their own work. They have been experimenting with coal to liquid. They have been experimenting with natural gas to gas liquid, which would make natural gas prices even higher because there is not enough supply, because they don't want to be dependent in the Air Force. They use 2\1/2\ billion gallons of jet fuel a year, and they want at least at least 60 percent of that to be from American products. They can't do that today. They are dependent on foreign oil.

The interesting thing we need to know, where does the foreign oil come from? Exxon is the 14th largest oil company in the world. The 13 larger are government-run oil companies. Most of the companies like Iran, Iraq, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the government owns the oil company, owns the oil, opens the refineries, owns the marketing strategy, and even countries like nearby Mexico.

We have all of these countries in the world. Most of the ones that are the big oil producers are not democracies. They are not particularly close friends of ours. There is much concern in the world today that 80 some percent of the known oil and gas reserves are opened by governments that are monopolies that own the whole shebang. They own it in the ground. They own the refineries. They own the marketing systems.

Unfortunately, the fear is that Venezuela is going down the same road that Mexico went. Mexico has huge reserves, but they have always been a government monopoly. They don't put money back into the oil fields, and so today they can't produce enough of their own. We actually export oil and gas both to Mexico when they ought to be exporting to us and to the rest of the world because they have huge reserves.

Because they are government run, they are corrupt. They steal from the oil reserves, money, and use it for other purposes and don't invest back. So their fields are so antiquated that they can't produce. There are many that are afraid today because in the last 3 or 4 years, three or four or five countries have taken over what were partly owned companies from the big oil companies, chased them out, taken over their equipment, taken over their refineries, taken over their operations, taken over their ownership, and they are now government-run monopolies.

That's unfortunate, because they are doing the same thing that Mexico and other countries have done. They are not putting their money back. They have kicked out the smartest people in the country on how to produce oil, how to do refineries, how to produce the energy we need, and so there is great concern around the world that, as they continue to do this, their ability to produce will decrease and decrease, and the oil supply will be shorter and shorter.

We sit here today with $78, $79 oil, $78.87, and we are storming the gulf away from probably $90 oil or any little blip in one of these big producing companies, and $100 oil. In fact, someone

was telling me today of a pipeline he was worried about that produces 2 million barrels a day, and he said that pipeline is too long, in a very dangerous situation in the world. If it was blown up, we would have $100 oil in a couple of days.

Should America be dependent on foreign, unstable countries, not democracies, not our friends, for the lifeblood of our country? I don't think so.

Let's bring the chart back up on energy here. I am for all of these renewables. I want all the wind we can get, all the solar we can get, all the ethanol and biodiesel we can get, geothermal. Why we aren't putting more hydroelectric in because we have dams all over this country that have never had hydroelectric hooked up to them. We should be expanding nuclear.

With the greatest coal reserves in the world, we should be force feeding coal to liquids and coal to gas mass. Now, some of the arguments I have had is, because of carbon sequestration, we can't do coal. Well, folks, we better do coal. We can work on the carbon sequestration as we refine the process of developing liquids and natural gas from coal.

Now, natural gas, I believe, is our road to the future, for the immediate future. We have huge reserves of natural gas, Outer Continental Shelf. Let's bring that world map back up here or the United States map back up here again.

We have huge reserves offshore. We only produce in the gulf, but we have huge reserves up and down the coast line.

Now, I have legislation that will open up the Outer Continental Shelf, and it's vital that we do that. It's vital that we produce, because we, every electric generating plant we have built recently is natural gas. So if we continue to have a hot summer, we will use a tremendous amount of electricity. In hot weather, they turn on the gas plants, peaker plants. Before, 12 years ago, we only used natural gas for peaking plants. That was high use in the morning and high use at night, but where they were not allowed to run during the day, only in emergency.

But then we took that restriction off, so now 98 percent of all the plants built in 12 years have been natural gas plants. They are cheaper, they are easier, but it's the most expensive electricity we are producing today. They are 22 percent of the volume, and they are 55 percent of the cost of electricity, because natural gas is so much higher than it used to be, because we have not produced natural gas in adequate numbers. But if we produced our offshore, if we continued to produce more in the West, we could bring natural gas prices down so we are not the highest in the world.

When Dow Chemical moved its big plant to Saudi Arabia that they are building right now, they didn't want to do that, but their natural gas bill went from $8 billion per year to $22 billion per year and continues to rise; $8 billion to $22 billion. Nobody talks about that.

Clean, green natural gas, it heats 50-some percent of our homes, 60- some percent of our businesses. It is used to make ethanol, it is used to make biodiesel, it is used to make hydrogen, and it could be fueling one-third of our vehicles. And if we did that, because you can burn natural gas in a gasoline engine. You have to use a different fuel system, but it is just a change. We know how to do that. But it has to be affordable, there has to be financial incentives there, and so we need to do that.

But the unfortunate part is America is just kind of going along like we have always had cheap energy. And I sometimes get angry at Congress and I get angry at the administration because energy has not been as high a priority as I think it should have been. But then 6 years ago, we had $2 natural gas and we had $10 oil; the world was awash in it. The only concern people had was we were importing too much of it from foreign countries and we weren't producing our own. But as cheap as it was, it didn't really matter.

But we are a long way from $2 natural gas and $10 oil. The average price of natural gas to the home last year was $12.50 per thousand and the current price of oil is almost $79, and expected to go higher.

So it seems to me that there would be a sense of urgency in this Congress and that legislation that we would be looking at this week would really deal with availability and affordability of energy. But, unfortunately, people keep saying that renewables must take over. Well, I wish they could. I am for them all, clean renewables. But clean, green natural gas can really bridge us until we have renewables playing a more significant role, until we have some new break-throughs.

My legislation to open up the Outer Continental Shelf will allow the first 25 miles to be locked up by law. Today, we are locked up for 200 miles. We are the only country in the world that I know of that has locked up the Outer Continental Shelf, and that is from 3 miles to 200 miles; that is considered our territory to produce. Everybody, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, these are pretty green countries, New Zealand, Australia. They all produce there.

Everybody talks about Brazil being energy independent. They are, because of ethanol. But it is not just ethanol. Ethanol was just a little piece of it. They also produced energy on their Outer Continental Shelf, and they don't now depend on anybody else for energy.

Unfortunately, we can't ever get there. We will always be dependent on foreign countries for energy. There is no way America can be self- sufficient, but we sure ought to be trying. We sure ought to be moving in the right direction instead of continuing to be more dependent. We are now 17 percent dependent on natural gas. Thank God for friendly Canada to the north. They produce about 15 percent, and we get about 2 percent of LNG. That is liquefied natural gas. That is another whole issue. I am not opposed to it. It is very expensive. You have to build new sending ports, you have to build huge sending ports, you have to build huge receiving ports that nobody wants; and there has been great resistance to that. And you have to build the biggest ships known to man to bring that natural gas here.

But, again, we are buying it from foreign, unstable, nondemocratic countries. Some say, it is okay for emergency, but don't we have enough of that? But clean, green natural gas, if we produced, opened up the Outer Continental Shelf, my bill, 25 miles remains closed; the second 25 miles, States' rights. They can open it if they choose to. The next 50 is open, but the States still have a say. If they don't want it produced, they can pass a law that their Governor signs that keeps them in the moratorium. And then the second 100 miles would be open.

Now, I would like to open it for oil because I think we should, but we haven't been able to pass clean, green natural gas. A natural gas well has never polluted a beach. A natural gas well has never polluted anything. It is a simple six-inch hole drilled in the ground with a steel casing put in behind it and the pipe is rigged up to allow natural gas to flow into a system.

Offshore, if you are past 25 miles, you will never see it. You only can see 11 to 12 miles. It will never be seen. You will never know it is there. And you can check with the people in the gulf, the best fishing in the gulf is where we produce gas and oil. The fish are attracted to the rigs. It helps make new reefs; it helps make barriers to protect them. It does not hurt aquatic life. In fact, it is probably the most environmentally friendly place to produce energy, and we as a country have said we are not going to do that. We are not going to produce energy there. In fact, we are not going to produce energy at all if we can help it.

The bill before us this week will restrict the production of energy in a whole lot of ways. I have already listed them. And that is very unfortunate for America, because there is a lot of incentives for renewables. But if you double wind from one-sixteenth of a percent, you now have one-eighth of a percent for energy. That doesn't change much. That doesn't really change anything.

And solar, we keep hoping for break-throughs, but it is even a smaller fraction. And geothermal is a big expense, and it is usually done with new construction. But in my country, I find out that when it gets below 10 degrees or 15 degrees into really hard, cold winter weather, it doesn't work well

enough and people start looking for other kinds of heat.

Let's have the chart here on my bill. The NEED Act is the bill we hope we can amend into the energy bill. It would open up the Outer Continental Shelf for gas only. And we do some things here that we think are important. States will get 37.5 percent. That will be up to 150 billion. That is with the known reserves. And we have never done modern seismographic out there, so most people who produce oil figure there is three times as much out there than we think because the old seismographic of 40 years ago wasn't very good and today we have much more sensitive seismic that will tell us exactly what's out there.

We are going to give 100 billion to the government for the Treasury; $32 billion will go into a fund for renewable energy that will help us promote the renewables of the future; $32 billion will go into carbon capture and sequestration research, because there are those who determined that we must capture carbon. I am not sold totally on that; I am still somewhat skeptic, but let's provide the money so we can capture the carbon and we can produce energy without putting carbon in the atmosphere if that is what they believe to be correct.

We put $20 billion to clean up the path of the Chesapeake Bay, the exact amount of money they say they need to clean up the Chesapeake Bay; $20 billion to restore the Great Lakes, exactly what they said they needed to restore the Great Lakes; $12 billion for the Everglade restoration; $12 billion for the Colorado River basin restoration; $12 billion for the San Francisco Bay restoration; and $10 billion for LIHEAP and weatherization, which we have to fund because energy prices today are forcing people out of their homes.

I come from rural America. We have big old farmhouses, and people hate to leave their original farmhouses. Some of them, their parents and their grandparents were raised there. They like it there, they are comfortable there, it is a nice location. But they are hard to heat. They are big old plank houses, they are not built like houses today, and it takes a lot of energy to heat them. And people, with today's oil prices and natural gas prices, are forced out of their homes. That shouldn't be in America.

With the energy prices that are facing us this year, this winter, by the time Americans drive their vehicles with possibly $3.50, $4 gasoline, and very high gas and fuel oil to heat their homes, they will be choosing between being warm, having adequate food, and other staples of life. I know last winter, which was a very mild winter in my area in Pennsylvania, up until January and then it was very, very cold from January 15 on for about 3 months; but overall, it was considered a mild winter because the first half was very mild. I know people that kept their homes at 58 degrees. Seniors in America shouldn't have to live in a 58-degree house. That is not how it ought to be. They ought to be able to afford to heat their homes.

And the tragedy is if we were allowed to produce, if this Congress would stop locking up the Outer Continental Shelf, if they would open up the reserves in the Midwest which some of them are taking off in the energy bill, we could have adequate natural gas in this country; the price could be affordable; Americans could be warm; and, the very best jobs in America like petrochemical and polymers and plastic and fertilizer and glass and steel plants and bricks could be made in America, and middle-class working Americans could continue to have the jobs that have historically allowed them to live a quality of life and raise their families.

Natural gas and energy prices overall are going to change the American economy. We are right on the verge of how much this economy can absorb. I was talking to someone who has worked on this all their life. They said they are astounded that $70 oil has not stalled our economy. They are just holding their breath because they know it can't get much higher without stalling our economy and putting our economy into a recession and possibly a world recession. These kind of energy prices.

America has to get busy. China is building coal plants weekly, nuclear plants monthly, building the largest hydro dams in the world and cutting deals all over the world for gas and oil and coal. They are out there because they know, like so many other countries know, energy is scarce today, it is high priced, and they have to be about securing their future.

This Congress has been negligent year after year in dealing with energy, and here we are now facing an energy bill that is actually going to move us backwards. The Pelosi energy plan has no energy in it. In fact, it takes energy out of the supply stream we have today and will force dependence up on foreign unstable parts of the world, with false hopes that we can conserve.

And I am for conservation. I am for all of the better light bulbs and more efficient appliances and all the things and more efficient cars. All of those things. But they move the pendulum very slowly. New CAFE standards take 10 to 15 years for the new fleet to fully be here. All of these other appliance changes, it is only when a person buys a new appliance does it impact. And I know people who have refrigerators that are 15 and 20 years old, and until they replace that they are using an older, wasteful refrigerator.

Folks, we need to have energy as the number one issue facing this Congress, energy availability and affordability. We became the strongest Nation in the world because we were the first to discover oil, harness oil, and give us an energy source that started the Industrial Revolution. The whole transportation revolution came from this country because we produced energy. We are choosing today to not produce energy, and we will fritter away, we will become a second rate nation in a very few years if we continue the wrong energy policy. And if we pass the energy bill that we are going to be facing on Friday, I believe we will increase dependence quickly, we will actually cause Americans to be forced to move out of their homes in the near future, not be able to live in the homestead because they can't afford to heat it.

We will continue to force millions of jobs overseas as we have in the past. Chemical plants have been built overseas in the last few years; they will continue to be rebuilt overseas. They can't move quickly, or they would have already been gone. It is a $2 billion, $3 billion, and $4 billion investment to build a small chemical plant, and $10 billion and $20 billion to build a large one. Folks, they are in the process of doing that.

We now make 50 percent of our fertilizer offshore. In fact, the ethanol issue is an interesting one, because we are taking food stock, corn. And to grow the corn, we have to have lots of fertilizer. It takes a lot of fertilizer to grow corn. And 50 percent of the fertilizer that we are using to grow corn is coming from foreign imports. Does that make any sense? I don't think so. Because clean green natural gas can solve all those problems.

I look at natural gas as the clean fuel that bridges us to the future. No NOX, no SOX, a third of the CO2 if you are worried about CO2. And why the environmental groups are against clean green natural gas, I will never know, because some of the renewables are not nearly as clean as clean, green natural gas.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 30 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, August 2, 2007, at 9 a.m.