John Peterson

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Well, it's interesting, we have the talking points of the Democrats that they have 68 million acres under lease; there are--some are saying 5,500 leases, some are saying 10,000 leases: That's enough, they're not producing. I had one of them challenge me in a debate today that he wanted me to join on a bill with him to force the oil companies to drill where they are. Folks, if it's not productive, if they've drilled 10 dry holes, they're not going to drill anymore. And in some of those deep water leases, it's 7 or 8 years before you get to productivity.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. And those coal plants will all be natural gas plants which will further exacerbate the natural gas prices. Center for Biological Diversity: Oil and gas drilling on public lands has devastating effects and must be stopped. They're winning. Friends of the Earth: Liquid coal is dirty, costly, mustn't do it. They're winning. These eight organizations are running this Congress.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. If the gentleman would yield, how did this happen? I know how it happened. I'm going to give you eight--and there's more than eight--eight organizations that are running this Congress when it comes to energy. It starts out with the Sierra Club. You know what their Web page says? They're against oil shale development. We're not doing it. They're against coal liquefaction. We're not doing it. They're against offshore energy production. We're not doing it. They're winning. Greenpeace: Phase out fossil fuels. We're trying to do it and we don't have a replacement. That's really what's going on. We've caused the world shortage. Environmental Defense: Must eliminate power plant smokestacks, enemy number one. League of Conservation Voters: Coal-to-liquid, wrong direction, can't do that. We're not doing it. Defenders of Wilderness: Every coastal State is put in harm's way when oil rigs go up. That's offshore. They're opposed. And they're winning. Natural Resources Defense Council: Coal mining is evil. And tell me coal isn't under attack. Coal is under attack. Close to 70 coal plants have been turned down by the States in the last 7 months.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. That's right.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. That's right.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. $10 a barrel. That's been most of our lifetime.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. $1.80.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Twenty percent of our grid is nuclear. We need 45 new plants by 2030 online to stay 20 percent of the grid, not grow. See, everything's shrinking. Hydro is becoming a smaller piece because we're not building dams. Everything's shrinking. Nuclear stayed even because all of our nuclear plants today are producing beyond their design capacity. We have enhanced their ability to make energy. I mean, America on nuclear needs to get on to what France has been doing, the reprocessing and reuse the fuel we have instead of storing it, where we use it, and when you get down to the end, you have very little fuel. But this country made a decision legislatively, we're not going to reprocess, we're not going to go down that road. So we've made a lot of bad decisions. And I say, how did this happen? Eight years ago, natural gas was $2; oil was $10. The argument was, do we use theirs or do we use ours? Just 10 years ago. In fact, we hit that a couple times 6 or 7 years ago. We had some real cheap energy just for a few months there. We got so complacent.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Well, we're so far behind the curve right now, we were talking to Minerals and Mines Management today. Many of our rigs went to Russia to drill because there's so much more activity there. The big owners go where the action is, and they're being paid bonuses to go to North Africa to drill. We don't have as many rigs in the gulf. Thirty percent of our rigs are gone. Our infrastructure has dwindled because we've not opened up. Now, the issue of can we be self-dependent, we would have to open up everything. It would take years to get the rigs here. We'd have to do coal-to-liquids, coal-to-gas. I mean, it would take a long time.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Fifteen percent of our natural gas comes from them, and they are our largest supplier of oil by far. Right off the Washington coast they produce. They have produced since 1913 in Lake Erie and sell us the gas. They drill gas only in Lake Erie every summer. They don't do it in the winter, but they do it every summer and sell us the gas. And we aren't even allowed to drill under the lakes horizontally. It makes no sense what we're doing in this country. Yesterday, I read an article that we ought to be partnering with Russia because they have so much resources and we need to be better friends with them. I'd rather help Mexico because they have great resources but aren't very good at producing them. They're not very efficient at producing energy. But they have a lot of gas and a lot of oil. If we had a North American game plan, where Mexico, the United States, and Canada, and Alaska, where we said let's produce our own energy, we could get there. I don't think we can be self-sufficient on our own, I mean that sincerely. I don't see it ever will in our lifetime, but we could be self-sufficient in North America, and we could say to OPEC: ``So long, see ya.''

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. In the first subcommittee last Wednesday we had six Republicans ``yes'' and nine Democrats ``no.'' Now, it's not totally been a partisan issue. This was the first time they locked up their vote. This new administration here, the Speaker and her team, have been very good at locking up votes. You have to admire them. They can get people to vote against their districts, vote against what they believe. But they've decided they're not going to open up the Outer Continental Shelf. Now, we were interested today whether they would still lock them up, whether they could hold them because in 2006 we passed a major offshore bill. We had 40-some Democrat votes. There are a lot of Democrats here who realize energy's important, and to produce your own is not some evil thing. With 67 percent dependency on oil, and half of that comes from unstable, unfriendly countries who gave us our tariffs, it would seem to me that everybody could agree let's eliminate at least half of our foreign dependence; let's stop feeding our enemy; let's stop allowing giving them the cash to buy up our Chrysler building, buy up our companies, buy up our industries. You know, industries in this country are getting purchased by foreign countries, and most of them are people who have our oil money. I don't think this is the America that Americans want. But I want to tell you something. I have faith in the American people. There's a debate going on right now. I have been on four different talk shows today. I have been on probably five or six radio shows today. Lots of print media yesterday. I did 15 different discussions. The American people are angry. Newt Gingrich came out with a poll: 73 percent of Americans want offshore production. Rasmussen came out with a poll Monday: 63 percent in their poll. It's going up daily because this is a discussion going on in this country, and they're mad. They're mad as hell. And they ought to be mad because we are locking--this Congress for 28 years has locked up America's resources that every other country uses. There is no country in the world--Norway, Sweden, are they environmentally friendly countries? You bet they are. New Zealand, Australia, are they environmentally-sensitive countries? You bet. They all produce offshore. Offshore is not a threat to our beaches, it's not a threat to our shorelines. It's a savior. It's where our cities are, it's where our population is, it's where our refineries are, where our gas lines are. You know, in New York City in zero weather, sometimes we will pay two and three times the American price for natural gas in zero weather because they can't get enough there. The price when the world is paying 10, they'll pay 25 or 30 for a few days at a time because if we had offshore production, we could feed them their--these cities wouldn't be paying these outrageous prices when cold weather comes. Last year for the first time--because we use so much for electricity now--last year for the first time in the history of this country, in two summer months when it was really hot, we made so much electricity with natural gas because in a real hot week, all of the peaking plants run all day long. They run all day long because that's the only way to keep the grid up. We actually drew down gas out of the reserve. See, at this time of the year we don't use all of our gas so we put it in reserve. We're putting $13 gas in the ground for next winter. Add storage costs, add pipeline charges, and a profit for the gas- distribution company, you're talking about pretty expensive gas. Last year we were putting $6.50 and $7 gas in the ground this time of year. Americans do not know what is coming. The industrial users are already paying 70 percent more this year because it passes through quicker to them. But in my State, PUC, every 90 days they adjust the price. This fall Americans are going to get hit with another bullet. It's going to be expensive home heating. And we should be doing something about it.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. If the gentleman would yield, the other success story we all hear about is Brazil. Doesn't everybody say Brazil is independent because of ethanol? Fifteen percent of their energy is ethanol. They went offshore. They just had a huge oil find offshore, but they are self-sufficient. They don't import energy anymore.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. We keep hearing from over there that it was all ethanol. Ethanol was just a piece. It was 15 percent. The rest was normal oil and gas energy. But they had a plan. I think we ought to have a plan for North America. Stop and think about Alaska and Canada. Canada is great. Canada produces oil and gas right off our main coast.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Well, it's a delight to join you. It's a historic day. Natural gas hit $13.28 a thousand cubic feet. That's almost double what it was last year at this time. What that means is Americans heating their 60 million homes this fall will pay almost twice as much to heat them as they did last year, on top of tremendous price increases to travel in their vehicles.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. This has all happened without a storm in the gulf, which always escalates prices, without any country having a major coup or problem, or without any terroristic attack on the system. I don't think anybody dreamed that we would have $135 to $140 oil at this time of the year. We are in the middle of June. We're not even into the heat of the driving season yet, and here we are with $13, I mean, we're within a few pennies of the peak of natural gas prices after Katrina. Dow Chemical made a statement just a week or so ago that in 2002 it cost them $8 billion for natural gas to run their company. It now costs them $8 billion a quarter. Here's what's happened. They used to be 60 percent onshore. Those were great American jobs. They're now 34 percent onshore. In South America natural gas is a buck and a half. In Russia it's barely over a buck. I mean, there's cheap gas all over the world. If you're making petrochemicals, polymers, plastics, fertilizer, if you're melting steel, melting aluminum, I want to tell you, if this Congress does not change its view on offshore, shale oil and ANWR in the very near future, bricks and glass will be made in Trinidad, South America. They will be shipped here in a day and a half in a boat, and there will not be a blue collar job left in America, because natural gas is the mother's milk of manufacturing and processing. They use it as an ingredient. Even the skin creams that our women love to soften, that's a derivative of natural gas. Natural gas is one of the most unique--chemists say we should never burn it. It's too valuable. But we are now using a lot of it for electric generation; 23 to 24 percent of our generation is now natural gas. And that is as we cease to permit coal plants around the country, they're all going to be natural gas plants. If the Senate continues its foolishness with carbon taxes and CO2s, that's all going to push the business to a natural gas which only emits one-third of the CO2 of other fossil fuels. But we're not preparing. We need to. Today we had a committee meeting scheduled, and my chart here shows-- it's interesting the Democrat talking points say that 80 percent of available resources are available to the American companies. That's not true. Eighty-five percent of our offshore is not available, period. The whole west coast is not available. The whole east coast is not available. About a third of the gulf is not available. That's where the prime oil and gas is in this country. They have it locked up. They want it locked up. They like these high prices because it's forcing Americans to change to other fuels. That is true. But let me tell you, I'm not sure how long the American economy can handle $130 oil and $13 natural gas without collapsing. And once this economy collapses and the world economy goes into a recession, we're going to be a decade digging ourselves out of the hole. There will never be money to balance the budget. There will never be money for heat and helping people winterize their homes. This country is on the verge of losing its economic base. Cheap energy. I was born one mile from Drakes Well, the first oil well. It changed the world. The whole manufacturing process of the world began in this country because of cheap energy. We've had $10 oil and $2 natural gas most of our lifetime. We had a spike in the 1970s, we had a spike in the 1980s, and a spike in the 1990s. We went to renewables. We tried to do other things, but it always came back to cheap gas and cheap oil. Nothing could compete. Well, folks, there's a philosophy around here that if we don't produce fossil fuels, we're going to produce something else. I'm saying ``what.'' What are we going to produce? If we double wind and solar-- and I'm for that in the next 5 years--but that doubling something in 5 years is ambitious. We're still less than one percent of our energy needs. I mean, there is no renewable. The renewable that has been the most generous to us and the most growth is woody biomass. Nobody talks about woody biomass. Hasn't had any incentive. No tax incentives. There's a million Americans this year probably going to help heat their homes with a wood pellet stove. Burning sawdust pellets. That's biomass. Many companies in my district--I come from the finest hardwood forest in America, northern Pennsylvania. Lots of mills. Lots of factories. The sawdust now is a byproduct. They heat their factories with it. Some of the coal plants use 20 percent wood waste because it allows them to sneak under the air standards if the coal is just a little dirtier than it should be. So it has found its marketplace. And the cellulosic ethanol that we're betting on. We have a mandate of 36.5 million gallons of--or 36.5 billion gallons of ethanol annually by 2030. The first 15 to be corn, and we know what's happened there where we're now at $7.86 corn as the market closed today. It was $1.80 just a short time ago. We're competing food with fuel. I didn't protest it. I had my concerns. But $8 corn is not something you can afford to burn.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Absolutely.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. What, $7.86.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. That is true. But I want to make a point there. I'm not against ethanol. After the 15 million they want to go to--or billion gallons, they want to go to cellulosic. But we have to remember we have a mandate on cellulosic ethanol that still is in the laboratory. We do not yet have the design of a successful cellulosic ethanol plant that we know will be productive that will compete. So that's pushing. I wish we were pushing coal to liquids and coal to gas with the same fervor because we know Fisher Tropes and two or three other messes, we could make gasoline, we could make fuel oil, we could make jet fuel out of coal. But no. There has not been much pushing for that. I am encouraged that the President came out for offshore, but that's a big move. We've been pushing him a long time. He didn't come out quite as strong as I had hoped. He said he would lift the Presidential moratoria if we lifted the congressional moratoria. I think he should have lifted his first and said, I'm lifting the Presidential. You lift. But he didn't. But I want to give him credit for going there. I want to give candidate McCain credit. He's come out. Offshore. That was not his normal position. And someone said, Well, he's a flip- flopper. Well, folks, when you see the light, when you see the facts-- you know, just a few years ago the argument was we should use theirs. It was cheap. We shouldn't be using ours. Well, that's not true any more. At $135 a barrel and $13 a thousand for gas, it's time to use ours. We enrich Americans. I mean, for us not to create the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of jobs in the production of energy in this country and put Americans to work producing our energy, we could be self-sufficient in natural gas, we could have reasonable natural gas prices. Natural gas could actually fuel a third of our auto fleet. All of our short-hauled vehicles, all of our construction vehicles, all of the little vehicles running around at the airport, all of those could be on clean green natural gas. No NOX, no SOX, and a third of the CO2. It could be compressed gas or it could be propane. Either one. They all can run--that's known technology. Why we're not going down that road, I don't know.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. It's hard for me to understand because natural gas burns cleaner than gasoline. And as we were talking, somewhere between 10 and 50 percent of our gasoline now comes from Europe. How does Europe have extra? Well, they've switched to diesel. They have diesel cars. They have extra capacity. A year ago in the spring we had very high gasoline prices. Not this spring but last spring. And remember they were higher than they were in the fall when oil was much higher. I think oil was $60-some a barrel and we had $3 gas and everybody wondered why. Well, in the spring when we start switching and using more gasoline, Europe was short themselves. They had used more gasoline. They didn't have the surplus they normally supplied us, so they couldn't supply our needs. So when you don't have enough, the market goes up. We didn't have enough gasoline in the world market, and so we paid higher gasoline prices last spring with $63 oil than we did last fall with $85 and $90 oil. Didn't make any sense, but that is the marketplace because Europe could not give us. But we're dependent on Europe. But back to natural gas. It just amazes me because here is what scares me: $13 natural gas is not a world price. That's an American price. We have the highest natural gas prices in the world. So many Members of Congress can't seem to understand that that it's not a world commodity. It's country by country. And so when you have the highest prices for natural gas and your company, like Dow Chemical uses $8 billion a quarter. That's $32 billion a year. You have got to produce your products where it's cheaper, and when it's a fraction of our cost--it's not like a half or a third--it's a fraction, sometimes, in some of those countries. So we're going to lose all of the industries. We won't melt steel in this country. We won't bend products. We will be cooking products in other countries because you use a lot of gas for heat. Anything that uses a lot of natural gas, if we don't get that under control--and the silly part of that is, we could be self-sufficient in our total lifetime. There is no shortage of natural gas, onshore and offshore, and this country tried to lock up their own plateau. In the last appropriations bill they locked up the shale oil in the west, sneaked it in the bill. Of course, the prohibition of drilling offshore is not legislation. It's stuck in the Interior bill. I was here 5 or 6 years before I knew it was there, and when I started talking about it, most Members of Congress didn't know it because it started 28 years ago. We have a vote every year. You know, today that vote was canceled. I'm not quite sure why.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentleman from Tennessee. The president of DOW Chemical said in a letter I received, he said, We have a debate going on in this country and one side wants production, the other side wants conservation and renewables. He said you're going to need them all. You'll need them both. There's no room for choice. At this time, I'm glad to be joined by my friend from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett).

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for his fine comments, and we yield back the balance of our time.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, today, June 11 of the year 2008, we had an interesting happening in the Capitol. We have had $4 gasoline for some time now, we have had $5 diesel, record high natural gas prices approaching $13 per thousand, the most expensive energy America has ever known. We had a chance today in committee the deal with this issue. I was stunned. I have been working on this issue for many, many years. We passed a major bill in 2006 with good bipartisan support, a lot of Republicans, but we had probably 40-some Democrats. A lot of people in this Congress realize that we must produce more energy in America if we are going to deal with the prices in America. Today the Interior subcommittee met. I offered an amendment to open up the Outer Continental Shelf. As you look at the chart to my left, that's the east coast and the west coast and down here in the gulf on both sides of Florida. The red or pinkish areas are locked up. There's 86 billion barrels in those areas, by old standards, by old seismographic tests which was 30-some years ago. Most people feel there is many times that. There is 400 trillion cubic feet of natural gas there. My amendment today would have removed the moratorium. For 27 years Congress has had legislative language that says we cannot produce here. It's locked up. This Outer Continental Shelf is from 3 miles offshore. The first three miles is controlled by the States. Next 197 miles is owned by us, the taxpayers, citizens of America. Not by any company, not by the President, not by Congress, but owned by the citizens, not by any State. It's our resources. The interesting and troubling fact is my amendment would have opened it up from 50 miles to 200. Every country in the world that has energy offshore produces it. It's the most environmentally sensitive place to produce energy. In most places the fisheries are better, they like the platforms, they like the places to hide. The fishermen love them being there because it's where the best fishing is. Down here in this little blue area, 40 percent of our energy comes from there that we produce in this country, that little bit of the gulf. Now there they produce right up to the shoreline. We were given a 50- mile buffer. There has not been an oil spill on a beach from a well except for the one in Santa Barbara in 1969, pretty good record, in my view. There has never been a natural gas well that's ever caused an environmental problem that I know of. But today we had a vote of nine ``noes'' for the Democrats and six ``yeses'' for the Republicans. I don't like to be partisan. I like to have bipartisan support, and I worked very hard on this amendment. I thought I had strong support from both parties, and I was stunned today. I guess it's another example of Speaker power. I have been in the legislative business for 31 years, 19 years at the State and 12 years here. I have seen legislative bodies that were good process bodies where you debate the issues from the subcommittee to the full committee to the floor. Then when the House and Senate meet in a conference committee, that really gives you seven shots at a bill. That's not happening here. This is the most top-down legislative body I have ever been a part of. Today showed that. I would bet the farm there are members on this subcommittee that wanted to vote for this, but for some reason chose not to. I am not going to name them, I am not going to second-guess them, but I was stunned. I think America would be stunned. I believe this Congress is way behind the folks, approaching 60 percent of Americans at a recent poll, who want us to produce offshore, on shore, wherever we have energy. I find, in talking to town meetings and large groups, when you discuss the issue and explain the facts and explain the alternatives, almost all Americans want energy produced so it's affordable. Our economy was built on affordable energy. The problem we have, the arguments today were that there are 68 million acres already leased, and that's enough. This is the percentage, and, actually, it's less than 3 percent, of the Outer Continental Shelf where there is a lease that has been offered. So there is a very small part of the continental shelf that actually has a lease on it. They said, well, there are 68 million acres, we need lease no more. Well, if you have leased property--yes, there are leases, there are leases that are not active--but if you have leased property and spent millions and millions of dollars and you get dry holes, you don't drill anymore. You find out there is not oil in there. As we look on here a little bit, this is interesting, this is a map. It's not as good as color as I had hoped to see. This is Cuba, this is Key West, this is Florida. These are the leases that have been granted by Cuba, China, Canada and Spain. I am not sure here, but these are the ones that are being negotiated now. Canada is going to be producing energy off our shores, and we absolutely disallow it. Does that make any sense? No. Our biggest competitor, China, will be possibly producing our oil and our gas, using it to compete against us. Natural gas is the one that's really in trouble in America. We know the oil prices today closed at $137, natural gas at $12.75. Natural gas is the one that we don't talk enough about. Oil is painful, but every country that competes with us pays that price. America may be the only country paying--now, this is not the price people pay. This is what the price today coming out of the ground is. Now, what's sneaking up on Americans this year, they already know it costs a lot to travel. Those who are on propane and fuel oil last year know it was pretty expensive to heat their homes. Natural gas did not rise a lot last year. But here is what happened to natural gas this year. This is the chart of natural gas for this year. This is what's happened this spring. Never before have I ever seen natural gas prices--this is the time of year when we are not heating and cooling much, it's call the shoulder season for use, and this is when we usually put it in the ground for next winter's storage to heat our homes. We are putting gas in the ground at a price more than we paid for it last year. Now you have to add storage costs, transmission costs and processing costs. Americans will be getting somewhere between a 60 to 100 percent increase of natural gas prices this winter. So those who are struggling to pay $4 to drive their cars are now going to struggle to heat their homes. The sad story is, with natural gas, our big employers like Dow Chemical in 2002 paid $8 billion for natural gas for a year's use. This year they are paying $8 billion every quarter, that's $32 billion. Folks, here is what has happened to the jobs and what will continue to happen if we don't deal with energy prices because the rest of the world is. Natural gas will push petrochemicals, polymers, plastic and many other steel and aluminum jobs--I predict, glass will be made offshore, bricks will be made offshore. Bulk commodities will not be made in this country because of natural gas prices, because you use so much. Here's what the arguments were. This is what people want to use. This is oil. From the middle over is history, this is what the Energy Department predicts for the future. I don't quite agree with this chart, because we are turning down coal plants all over the country. The natural gas will be much wider, coal will be much shallower. I don't see the growth in coal. We also all had high hopes for coal-to-liquid. That's sort of on hold in this country. Why, I don't know, because of carbon, I guess. The concern of carbon has become a greater concern. Nuclear, to stay here, we have to have 35 to 40 nuclear plants built in addition to what we have to keep nuclear where it's at as 20 percent of the grid. Nonhydro, the amount, everybody wants--hydro is not growing because we are not doing dams. Nonrenewables are mostly woody biomass and hydro. That's what most of this is. If we double wind and solar, and we hope we can, we are less than 1 percent of our energy needs in 5 years or 10 years whenever we do that. That's the scary part. Now here's the dependence part. When I came to Congress, we were in the 40s. We are now 66.3 percent dependent on imports, and here is where we get it. Canada is our best friend to the north, Mexico is our next best friend, nonOPEC and Ecuador, and then we go down here. These are the countries that are going to own us. These are the countries where our wealth is going. In fact, I think I heard a speaker a few moments ago on floor talk about the purchase of the Chrysler Building by one of the Mid East countries. Ladies and gentlemen, if America does not deal with energy, we will not compete in the global economy of the world. We cannot have the highest energy prices known anywhere and compete. We will not have middle-class jobs. The middle class in America will disappear. That's not the America I want. Now, how we get past this partisanship, how we get past that we can take the minuteness of wind and solar and replace fossil fuels, I wish I knew. I am for hydrogen. I belonged to the hydrogen caucus for years, but it has not grown. Wind and solar has grown a very small amount. Until we can store electricity, we are going to depend on fossil fuels to make it. If we continue with the chart I just looked at to not produce coal plants, that's going to come on natural gas. If we don't open up the Outer Continental Shelf and much of the Midwest, we are not going to have the natural gas--and natural gas, let's come back to the natural gas chart. Natural gas, in my view, is the clean, green fuel. We would have been far wiser, in my view, to have used compressed natural gas in automobiles than ethanol. Automobiles, with a couple of thousand dollars addition can burn natural gas. That's a clean fuel. If we open up the Outer Continental Shelf, if we opened up the Roan Plateau in the west and some of the new areas that we know are potentials in this country--but we have to drill a hole in the ground, and why aren't we doing that? Well, here are the people that I think have been successful. I was having a debate late week with the Sierra Club on NPR radio in California. When the debate was over she assured the audience that she would be beating me back next week when I offered my amendment. They won today. The Sierra Club, they are against shale oil development. They are against coal gasification, and they are against offshore energy. Then we have Greenpeace, and they want to phase out all fossil fuels. They want to eliminate all of these and replace them with these. Now, I wish we could do that. They are opposed. Environmental Defense Fund, no power plants, no smokestacks, League of Conservation Voters, no coal-to-liquid, wrong way to go; Defenders of Wildlife, no offshore, no coastal production; Natural Resource Defense Council, no coal, coal is evil; Center for Biological Diversity, no oil and gas drilling. That's devastating on public lands. Friends of the Earth, no liquid coal, that is dirty. Folks, we have technology in this country today. We can produce energy cleanly. We can burn it cleanly. We have clean coal technology we are refusing to build to replace the old plants. If we continue, we are the only country I know of in the world that is on a madness mission, I call it, that we are not going to use fossil fuels. Now I want to grow all of these. I would be building hydrodams. The only one that has grown on this chart, and I have another chart that shows it better, woody biomass has doubled in the last decade. That is wood pellet stoves. Almost a million Americans use them now. That is using wood for generators, small plants for electricity using wood waste, and heating small factories. I am from a wood area, the greatest hardwood forests in America are in northern Pennsylvania, and we dry kiln our wood. We used to use propane and natural gas, now we use wood waste. Wood waste has found a marketplace, and it is continuing. But that's the only one that has had measurable growth that you can put on a chart. I don't have that chart here. But folks, we need to have a comprehensive policy. But until we have the renewables available to use, we have to use clean fossil fuels in the very best manner we can. But if this Congress says no in full committee a week from now, we will be doing our bill in full committee, if they say no again, partisanly, and if they say no on this floor when we do the Interior bill, America will miss its only chance. My bill, the Outer Continental Shelf bill, has 170-some cosponsors, and can't get a hearing or a discussion. We are not going to talk about fuels in this Congress. Now we passed a great bill a couple of weeks ago where the Democrats proposed to enable us to sue OPEC. We are going to sue a group of countries, I had the chart here a minute ago, that we don't think have produced enough energy, when we refuse to produce it at all. Now what is the logic of that? What court is going to listen to that, and how do you even have a serious face. Back home, people laughed about that. They thought it was stupid. We also have proposals to tax oil companies. Who pays the taxes, the energy users. I know there is hatred for the energy companies. They are really a small part of the mix. The vast majority of energy in this country is not produced by Big Oil. It is produced by small producers in my district in Pennsylvania and all down through the south. It is mostly independents. They are the brand names. They own some of the refineries. They own a lot of product lines in their names, but they are a small part of the production of energy. Yet we want to punish energy production. We passed a bill here once, fortunately the Senate didn't, that was going to tax all energy companies. And I have two refineries in my district, one who was struggling, American Refiners and United Refinery, and we were going to make them pay higher taxes than the businesses right down the road. Did that make any sense? No. That is taxing American energy; not taxing imports but American energy. I believe this Congress is way behind the American public. When I go back to my office many times after giving one of these speeches, I have phone calls for hours, I have phone calls for days saying I believe in what you said; I believe America should be producing energy; thank you for speaking out. I believe the American public in the next election, I believe energy availability and affordability will be one of the major issues that they will be looking at because I don't think we are done. I don't think $4.05 gasoline is the end. We have these high prices today that have scared the American public. I have people in my district who don't know how they are going to get through the winter and how they are going to heat their house. They don't know how they are going to make it. We have these high prices today. We have not had a storm in the gulf, which interrupts a lot of production when it happens, for 2\1/2\ years. Everyone is predicting we are going to have major storms in the gulf, hurricanes, and that will eliminate a lot of energy production and prices will skyrocket. We have not had a successful terrorist attack on our energy supply system. That could happen tomorrow. We have not had a major foreign country, and I had that chart of countries we get our oil from, most of those are dictatorships that could tip over. When there is a little trouble in Nigeria, energy prices skyrocket. When there were problems in Venezuela, prices skyrocketed. When Chavez was arguing with Exxon, oil went up $20 just because they were arguing. The reason is there is no surplus in the system. Historically we had eight million barrels of oil that another country could produce if some country couldn't produce. Today we are down to where this is about a million barrels of oil. It is 86 million barrels a day countries use. We use 21, and so there is only a one million barrel surplus. So if a country has problems and produces three million less, there is not enough oil. Now the reason these gas prices that I showed you earlier are going up, we are using more gas than we are producing. One of the big storage companies told me a month ago, they are not sure they can get their storage full this winter and they have always had it full by winter because we cannot produce enough gas, we have to put it in underground caverns and store it for winter. I believe this Congress is at the root of the high prices of energy, and three Presidents, too, I am not going to hold them countless, because we have not had an adequate, thoughtful energy policy for America. While the rest of the world is building an energy supply for themselves, we are twiddling our thumbs and we are refusing to produce fossil fuels. I think if this Congress before we recess in July does not deal effectively with energy and open up supply, you are going to see the beginning of the decline of the America we know. It is a national security issue. It is an economic issue. American companies cannot compete, and when they can't compete here, they will diminish their operations here and they will expand them over there. They have had other reasons to do that, but the biggest one has been energy. So I beg my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, let's get by this partisan bickering and let's support an energy policy for America. The gentleman from Ohio has come to join us, and I yield to Mr. Latta.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentleman from Ohio for his very thoughtful comments. I now recognize the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Wamp).

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Madam Speaker, today natural gas opened at $12.65 per 1,000 Btus. That is an almost 100 percent increase from this time a year ago. Natural gas is the clean, green fuel that powers our manufacturing economy, accounts for 23 percent of the energy consumed in America and heats 52 million of our homes. Yet as prices continue to skyrocket and companies move offshore because America has the highest natural gas prices in the world, this Congress has done absolutely nothing to increase production. Tomorrow, I will offer an amendment to the Interior appropriations bill that will lift the congressional moratorium on offshore production from 50 to 200 miles, which happens to be the safest and most environmentally friendly place to produce energy. There is no need to beg the Saudis for more oil and Canada for more natural gas. We have vast reserves here in America. We need to produce American energy with an American labor force and give Americans energy they can afford.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I find the testimony from the gentleman from New York interesting. He mentioned pellet stoves, one of the new future heat. 800,000 Americans now heat their homes with a pellet stove. There's 30 or 40 pellet mills sprung up around the country but with no government incentive. Now, we ought to be incentivizing people to be able to heat their homes with woody biomass. Woody biomass has been the fastest growing energy but without government incentives. We need to be incentivizing that. He also mentioned cellulosic ethanol, which is from woody biomass or garbage or sweetgrass. That's in the laboratory. We're all for that. But it's in the laboratory. There is no refinery producing that kind of energy today at any scale at all. In fact, we have not yet designed the first refinery. It's future. The only thing in all of the bills he mentioned that produced energy was we stopped using 70,000 barrels a day in the Strategic Reserve, and that's when we use 21 million barrels a day for the country, we save 70,000. That's the only production that's been passed. As we look to my left, we have a chart that shows offshore locked up. Oil and gas out there proficient. Lots of it. Locked up. Well, if we want to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, there's a way to do that. The NEED Act, H.R. 2784, my bill does that by producing offshore, putting a part of the royalties. We have 32 billion for carbon capture, 32 billion for renewable energy, 100 billion for the treasury, 150 billion for producing States, 20 billion for the Chesapeake Bay. Now, these are at old gas prices. This is gas. Natural gas was $12.50 when I left my office. Last year at this time it was $6.50. That's the gas we were putting in the ground for next winter. Americans are going to get whacked this winter because we're putting gas at almost twice the value in the ground for winter storage than we did last year.