John Peterson

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 434) to direct the Secretary of Agriculture to enter into a cooperative agreement to provide for retention, maintenance, and operation, at private expense, of the 18 concrete dams and weirs located within the boundaries of the Emigrant Wilderness in the Stanislaus National Forest, California, and for other purposes, as amended.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume, in closing, to thank the ranking member, the gentlewoman from the Virgin Islands (Mrs. Christensen), for her support in helping to bring these four bills to the floor today. Especially the first one, I failed to thank her on the floor for that, so I will do it now. I want to thank her and all the Members for their support in bringing these four bills forward. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on H.R. 695, H.R. 434, H.R. 1628, and H.R. 1937, the four bills just considered.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, yes, we need more conservation and more efficient use of energy, but we also need an ample supply of all kinds of energy to prevent the price spikes that threaten our jobs and hurt our American families. ANWR is our best reserve. Every well we drill in ANWR, we would have to replace it with 70 in the lower 48. What are our opponents for? Are they for coal or nuclear and more hydro? I do not hear that. They want to generate electricity with gas, but they propose drilling to get the gas. They talk about renewables. When you back out hydro, we have 1\1/2\ percent. I am for renewables, but 1.5 percent will not fill our needs. Do the opponents support drilling on the West Coast, the East Coast and the Gulf? No. Opening up the Rocky Mountain reserve? Drilling under the Great Lakes like Canada does? No. The monuments? No. What are they for? They are for pipe dreams, that will give us shortages and high prices that endanger home ownership and kill job creation and destroy the American dream, because the American dream is fueled by energy, and we need it.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, I think this is a good amendment. This makes a good portion of this bill even better. I think the ANWR portion of this bill is one of the most important parts. This will help us with an area that has been neglected. Our public lands have been underfunded. We have not taken care of them well. The Forest Service alone has a $9 billion backlog which includes maintenance of the heritage sites, recreational facilities, trails, watershed improvements, installations for run-off and control of erosion and trapped sediments, structures needed to improve habitat for wildlife, fish and threatened and endangered species. $271 million is needed to maintain the Forest Service trail system that people hike on and recreate on. Mr. Chairman, we were doing a little back-room math here. This could be $250 million a year for renewables and maintenance if we sell a million barrels a day. If it is 2 million barrels, we can have $500 million in each of those funds, putting them at the front of the line for the first time for the funding they need.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentleman for yielding time. Mr. Chairman, we have had a pretty good debate here today, I have heard most of it, until a few moments ago. The pink snake that we were shown is a fraud. It is an absolute fraud. That map, if kept in context, would have been millions of acres of ANWR covered. A pipeline going from the wells that would be drilled to the existing Alaskan pipeline would not be visible on that map from this distance. A pipeline in Prudhoe Bay is not something that ruined the Prudhoe Bay area. I am here to say, folks, let us have a debate that is fair and that makes sense. The pink snake has nothing to do with what is going to happen in ANWR. ANWR is our best oil reserve that America has anything to do with. Every well we drill in ANWR can prevent 70 wells needed in the lower 48. It can be done environmentally sound, and it should be.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, foolish price controls really caused much of California's problems.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I will give the gentleman the figures here. This is the Department of Energy. This is interesting. I will give the gentleman the change. Currently, 22 percent of our energy is from coal, and they are predicting it will be 21 percent in the year 2020, that is 19 more years. Oil is currently 40 percent and will decrease only to 39 percent. Natural gas is the growth area. It is going to go from 23 to 28 percent. And nuclear they show dropping from 8 percent of our energy source to 5 percent, and they show renewable staying at 7. Now, that will be growth in renewables, but only as much as the growth in energy consumption, because the percentage is not changing. Now, I hope we can do better than that. I hope renewables could double. But if we double renewables in the next 20 years, we would still only be 14 percent of our overall energy use. One issue I wanted to mention on natural gas too; now, in oil, as we stop producing enough oil to run our economy, we then started to import from all over the world. We import from like 20 different parts of the world. Unfortunately, a lot of it is from unstable parts of the world that are not real friendly to us. But natural gas, we only import from two countries, Mexico and Canada, where we do it on pipeline. We do import a little bit of natural gas, but it has to be liquefied and I think there is only one port in the United States that can accept tankers of liquefied natural gas, liquefied natural gas from other parts of the world. That is the only way you can transport it is to turn it into liquid and then turn it back into gas again, and we only have one port. So we cannot import natural gas like we can import oil. Only from Canada and Mexico. We are 80-some percent self-sufficient ourselves currently, but with the amount of power plants we are hooking up; when we hook up a power plant, it takes a lot of gas wells to fill up that pipeline to supply that power plant. So in my view, the next year or two, the amount of natural gas we can have on hand is going to be very important to make sure we do not have spikes in natural gas prices that would push our seniors out of their homes and push businesses out of business.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. The animals are only there a few months of the year. Back to the other issues, in Penn State they have new research that has been very successful at making jet fuel out of coal. They also get a carbon product that could be used in the carbon industries. That is moving to refinery development this year. They also have some coal boilers that interest me. They have one that would burn gas, powdered coal, or oil. Think if a factory, hospital or business had the ability to burn any one of those three fuels cleanly. And the clean technology is with us; the scrubbers and all the equipment is with this boiler. Now if you are a business person, a hospital, or one of our educational facilities, we buy the fuel that is the cheapest. We are not in bondage to any one fuel. They also have the fluidized bed boiler that we are utilizing in Pennsylvania a lot for burning our old waste coal piles, with high sulfur and very low Btu. The waste coal was piled on top of the ground. We are now burning and getting rid of it because it was an environmental hazard. The fluidized bed process will allow us to burn almost anything, that process where we use crushed limestone with whatever we burn, and the limestone locks up with the pollutants. Then with the scrubbers, we really have a very fuel-efficient and a very clean burn. That is another type of burner that I think we ought to be promoting, because again, we could burn coal and animal waste, or oil, a blend of oil and coal. We could burn whatever was cost effective. In some cases it might be animal waste, animal fat, or different things we know are problematic today to dispose of, they could be burned as fuels. They are doing some very interesting research at our universities to help us diversify our energy needs.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. We are in the technology wave. It is about time to wrap this up. Let us quickly go over the chart down front, America's energy situation. Foreign oil dependence is now 56, and we will be 66 in 10 years. Natural gas prices soared to triple last year's prices, which caused home heating last year in my area to be a real pain and caused some businesses to go out of business. No new gasoline refineries built in 10 years; no new nuclear plants licensed in over 10 years. There is new nuclear technology today that is much superior to the past, not nearly as expensive to put in place. No new coal plants built in 10 years. There is a new one being built in Pennsylvania right now. It is going to be using, again, waste coal that is on top of the ground already. Gas and electric transmission capacity is overloaded. Those are some of the problems. Anyone who says we do not have energy problems in this country, we have distribution problems and access problems. As we said in the beginning, for energy to be affordable and available to people and businesses, we need strong, ample supplies of each and every kind of energy. And we need to develop a system that is not so dependent on oil, not so dependent on one fuel, but gives people alternatives. Then people that use a lot of fuel in a business could choose the fuel that is the cheapest for the day. We have the technology to do it cleanly. We need to, as time goes along, to grow the renewables. I think fuel cells are a great potential. There will be slight growth in wind and solar. I do not think they will be major players. Geothermal has some potential. None of those will put enough into the system to even take care of our growth in energy needs. Fuel efficiency, conservation and fuel efficiency, can only take up half of the slack of the energy-need growth, so we have to have more energy and a system to deliver it.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I think we all should be applauding the President for raising this issue, because it was not a popular political issue, but it is an issue that needs to be addressed. Because if America is going to grow, and our energy use is growing, but maybe we do not give ourselves enough credit. But while the economy in this country grew 126 percent, energy use grew 30 percent. So we have improved our efficiency, we have done that, very much so. But we need to continue to do so. Now, $10 oil and $1.50 gas a few years ago kind of took our eyes off the ball. It made all other forms of energy noncompetitive. We could not compete with cheap gas and cheap oil. Now, if the prices do not get too high, but stay stably high to where other energies can compete with them, wind and solar and geothermal and fuel cells have a chance of competing in areas, so they can become a bigger factor when they can compete pricewise.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, just to look at a few of the spikes that were regional in the last few years. In 1999, the fuel oil, truck fuel price was, in the East, from about Pennsylvania up to New England and for most of the winter, trucking companies were calling me and going out of business because they could not compete with their competitors because their fuel prices had doubled. But they were regional problems. Then, in the year 2000, in Chicago and many areas that had the huge gasoline peaks and gasoline prices there and I think they were over $2 a gallon. Last winter, the changes, because of the problem the gentleman is having in California, and 95 percent of the new generation for electricity is natural gas. Historically in this country, we did not use natural gas for power generation. Maybe a little bit of peaking, but not regular power generation. It was basically saved for home fuel and for commercial industrial, as the easy, clean fuel. So now that we are major into using natural gas for power generation, we have spiked the price. Because last winter, gas prices in my part of the country were up 120 percent for home heating. Now, that took a lot of money out of spendable income. A lot of people have not talked too much about it, but last November and December in this country were the coldest Novembers and Decembers in history since they have been keeping track of temperatures. So they were not real cold temperatures, but they were cold every day of the month, each month. They were very cold months, the coldest on record. So there was tremendous natural gas use and there was inadequate supplies in storage, because they put natural gas in the ground in the summertime in storage caverns and then they use it in the winter. So last winter, we had gas prices running $2 and something a thousand retail, they went to $8, $9, and $10 a thousand. In my district I actually lost businesses who depend on natural gas, who are heavy gas users; and we had a fallout from that. I had a company relocating to Louisiana, and another one went out of business because they no longer were competitive because of the natural gas prices. I think with this great consumption of natural gas now for power generation, until the drilling can catch up, until the gas lines, the transmission lines can be built, in my view, natural gas spikes a couple of winters in a row can really have a huge impact on seniors staying in their homes.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, economically, it may take a little while, but when a company in California or any State that has a prolonged energy spikes and the rest of the country does not, we have put that company in a noncompetitive position immediately and, in time, they will not be able to compete with companies that are using a lot more less costly power.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. The other issue is, I remember rolling brownouts during a winter a few years ago when energy was short in Pennsylvania and it was zero degree weather and the problems that were caused when electric was off just for a few hours. Maybe the gentleman could share with us a little bit about what happened. I heard there were industries that were actually deprived power.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Well, the energy prices are important ones to ourselves, along with our traveling costs and our home costs. But we pay them again in our education costs, we pay them again in our health care costs. And in business, we pay them again in business; if one owns a business, that is a high energy user, so it hits us a lot of ways when energy prices spike that much.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I would ask the gentleman, what kind of electric cost increases are happening in California?

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, we thank the gentleman from Utah. We hear now an Indian perspective of energy potential also. We are really covering the country tonight, from one end of the country to the other. We are now at the far West Coast, where there have been real challenging, interesting energy problems. I yield to my good friend, the gentleman from California (Mr. Radanovich).

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from West Virginia for her very thoughtful comments, especially about coal. We are now joined by our friend the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Cannon). Welcome to our discussion on energy.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Michigan for his wise words. You can tell the gentleman is a physicist by his thought processes. We are delighted to be joined now by the gentlewoman from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito), who comes from what I would call coal country.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentlewoman from New Mexico for her thoughtful comments. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers), a physicist of the body here, a man who is used to very complicated issues. I am interested to hear his views tonight of where he thinks America is in energy.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, tonight a group of us here would like to talk about energy. We have heard a lot of discussion about energy. In fact now that gasoline prices have kind of dropped off, home heating prices have declined and things have sort of settled down, electric shortages in the West have not been happening for a few weeks, people say there is no crisis, it is just a lot of hype, a lot of smoke. I am not one who believes that, and I agree with President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. This country needs a comprehensive energy policy. Let us look at the record and see the trends happening. Recent trends, everybody has concern that the dependency on oil was coming from parts of the world that do not care about us, OPEC nations. We are approaching the 60 percent factor. That is not a healthy thing for our country. Coal, there has been a very flat use of coal and a resistance to the new clean coal-use technologies. Coal use has been flat in this country, and maybe slightly declining. Then look at nuclear where the percentage is slowly dropping. There has been a moratorium on new nuclear uses ever since the problem that happened in Pennsylvania many years ago. There have been no new plants built or planned; and the interesting part is in a recent report from the Department of Energy, the problem with nuclear continuing is the resistance of relicensing of existing nuclear plants. If we do not relicense our current plants, we are going to lose a great deal of our electricity. Then we have hydro. The Department of Energy had the same mark beside hydro: flat, slightly declining, difficult to relicense. That is the view of the Department of Energy. Then we have renewables, and we would like to see them grow and expand and take up the marketplace. In renewables, we have had very slow growth in solar, wind, geothermal, and more recently fuel cells. I think fuel cells are the one with the huge promise, probably sooner than others. There are those who think solar and wind can solve our problems. Every graph I look at shows them slow, almost no growth. Then we have the infrastructure issue that we take for granted. We do not worry about how our electricity gets to us, or how our natural gas gets to us; but we have a gas transmission system that is not well connected and not large enough, and does not cover some parts of the country so there are parts of the country that do not have access to natural gas. Electric transmission. We do not think much about those electric lines going from community to community; but that is how we get our power, and that system is aging, inadequate to supply the needs of today. The refining capacity in this country has been slowing declining, the number of refiners; and yet our use of petroleum products has been climbing at a fast rate. Is that a healthy situation to be in? If we really want to have energy that is affordable and dependable, we have to have stable prices. To have stable prices, we have to have ample supplies of all kinds of energy. A few years ago we were sort of drunk in this country on $9 and $10 oil, and $1.50 natural gas, and that made us very complacent about conservation. It made fuel costs very insignificant. But that has all changed, and it can continue to change. If we have an energy plan in this country that meets our future economic needs, we need to have one that increases energy efficiency and conservation, one that ensures adequate energy supplies in generation, renew and expands the energy infrastructure. We need to encourage investment in energy technologies, provide energy assistance to low-income households, and ensure appropriate consideration of the impacts of all the regulatory policies. Mr. Speaker, I think there are a lot of things to do. These are all complicated issues. I am going to conclude my comments and then call on the gentlewoman from New Mexico, but just look at where we are at today. Today, petroleum is 40 percent of our energy; natural gas is 23 percent; coal is 22 percent; nuclear is 8 percent; and renewables are 7 percent. We look down the road 19 years to the year 2020, and there is really not much change on those who are estimating. Our gas usage will increase because we are now using a lot of gas for power generation, something we did not do, will go from 23 percent to 28 percent. Petroleum will drop from 40 percent to 39 percent. Coal will drop from 22 to 21 percent. Nuclear will drop from 8 to 5 percent. Renewables will remain at 7 percent. That is the projections of the Department of Energy. In my view, we have some very large issues that need to be dealt with. We have some mountains to climb if we are going to provide affordable energy to the American citizens. With this I will call on my good friend from New Mexico (Mrs. Wilson).

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I do, too. I thank the gentleman from California, a good friend. So from the east coast to the west coast, we will join hands and hopefully can bring this one home for the people of this country. I thank all who participated tonight to talk about energy, an issue that is number one in this country and one that I commend President Bush and Vice President Cheney for having the courage to tackle. It is our future. Energy is what runs this country; and we must have abundant supplies, a delivery system, and we must use it wisely.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I think this energy plan is going to diversify us. We are far too dependent. Our largest dependence is 40 percent on oil. I think we need to lower that percentage, because we only have somewhere between 2 and 3 percent of the world's oil in this country under our own control, when we have 45 percent of the world's coal, we have a lot of our own natural gas, we are producing 80-some percent of our own natural gas without imports.

Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I want to go into one more issue that we have not talked about here and that is ANWR. And that is the one a lot of people are cautious about talking about, but I am not. With the improvements in technology, it will allow us to develop with very little impact on the environment, and we can drill directionally from gravel pads on the surface, roads to drilling sites would be constructed only on ice and would melt in the spring when the snow melts. We are only going to drill on 2,000 acres of ANWR, when there is actually 19.6 million acres. We are only going to be drilling on 14 percent of Alaska's coastline. So we are not going to endanger all of Alaska, like some people think; and we will have a minimal impact. The interesting thing is that because of the tremendous reserves there, every well we drill there, and there are two different charts of production in the lower 48 and in Alaska. One chart says 45 wells would have to be drilled in the lower 48 to replace one well in Alaska; the other one would be 70. I personally think the 70 figure is the most accurate. The U.S. Geological Survey did a study. It came up to 16 billion barrels of oil were available in ANWR. That is enough to replace oil we import from Iraq for 58 years. I see now they are the sixth largest import country. The opponents would argue that ANWR oil would only supply the U.S. for 180 days. This would only be true if we immediately stopped all other sources of oil, if it was our only source of oil; and we know that is not the case. Seventy-five percent of Alaskans support it. They know the issue best. Prudhoe Bay, everybody who has been there has said we can drill there safely without harming the environment. We have been drilling there for 25 years. Environmental groups claim it will harm the caribou. They have increased five-fold in Prudhoe Bay since drilling began there in the seventies. Nature and hunters are more of a threat to wildlife than drilling. ANWR development would create 736,000 new jobs. ANWR is the largest oil accumulation anywhere in the world. Only 14 percent of Alaska's Arctic shoreline would be open to exploration overall. Opponents say 95, but that is not true. Opponents say 5 percent is protected, but actually 86 percent is protected. The pipeline from Prudhoe Bay is in place. We just have to extend from ANWR to Prudhoe Bay and the pipeline is there. There is also a great source of natural gas there; but again, our problem is how do we get it here. The ANWR issue is one that I think needs to be looked at very carefully. I personally support it. I think it is better to drill one well in Alaska instead of 70 someplace else. With a pipeline in place, the infrastructure in place, it just makes sense.