The Standing Rules of the Senate are drafted to encourage vigorous public debate on our nation’s most important issues. Indeed, the U.S. Senate is often referred to as “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” The Rules allow any Senator to seek recognition from the Chair at any time and, absent a temporary agreement to the contrary, to speak without interruption so long as he or she wishes. Debating important questions before the Senate is one way a Senator can highlight an issue, advocate for a change in policy, or voice his or her opinion on pending legislation.
Senate debate occurs in public, and is televised on CSPAN and transcribed in the Congressional Record. For your convenience, I post transcripts of my Senate floor speeches on this site for your review. I hope you find them informative and useful. My web site also makes available information on my voting record and legislation that I have sponsored in the Senate.
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Sessions Speaks on Energy
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Alabama.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Georgia. That was such a good summary of where we are, and we do need to put aside partisanship. We do need to acknowledge that a lot of things have changed and those changes require this Government to make some decisions that can help us deal with the crisis we are facing. I am not a negative person. I believe we will work our way through this. But I am going to say some things that are honest and discouraging and worrisome about where we are today as a nation. The surging price for energy is a crisis that is moving our economy into a recession, and it is absolutely savaging the family budget. Record prices that we are facing today have a real impact on small businesses and family budgets across my State. My home county was rated the No. 1 county in America for the percentage of money spent on oil and gas, because it is a rural area, a poorer area, and people drive a long way to work. A larger percentage of their wealth is spent on buying fuel than any other county in America. So it is personal to me.
The average price of regular unleaded gasoline climbed to $4.10 a gallon as of yesterday. One year ago it was $2.84, and 2 years ago, it was $2.62. As a result, the typical American family with two automobiles driving an average of 24,000 miles a year is paying approximately $1,260 more per year for the same amount of fuel, according to the Energy Information Agency. That amounts to $105 a month of disposable after tax, after house payment, after retirement, after Social Security, after insurance, the little after tax money that people take care of their families on, $105 more a month coming out of that to pay for the increase in gasoline over the past year.
I hear we are now going to soon be having a LIHEAP bill which would be a bill, I suppose, as it usually is, to increase funding for people who have to buy heating oil and heating in the winter. The Government will subsidize that energy for those people, give them more money so they can buy more of the product. That is the policy we are having from our Democratic leadership. Has anybody thought maybe we should encourage people to use solar energy or geothermal or wind to heat their homes? We know the reason why that is not being suggested. That is, it is not ready yet in mass production. In many areas of the country, it is not feasible. Solar energy is four times as expensive as nonsolar energy. That is why people can't afford the current rates. They certainly can't pay four times as much. I say that to ask, what are we going to do now? That is the question. What is ready to help us deal with this crisis now?
Last week the Energy Information Administration and the Cambridge Research Associates reported that the price of natural gas surged to more than $12 per million Btus. That is up from $8.94 in February. That is a one-third increase in a few months in natural gas prices. Of course, this represents an enormous economic hit to the American family, businesses that have to be competitive in the world marketplace, and the economy. Congress cannot go home until we take some action that addresses these issues. According to T. Boone Pickens--you may have seen his ads, an old oil man now into the wind business and favors utilization of natural gas for automobiles, which I think has real possibilities; it is much cleaner than gasoline--we are on track to spend this year $700 billion in American wealth overseas to purchase 60 percent of the oil we utilize in this country. This represents one of the greatest threats to our economy we have ever faced. When the price of oil goes up, the stock market goes down. That is almost a daily occurrence. This is because virtually every industry is affected by high oil prices.
In addition, this export of our national wealth decreases the value of the dollar. When the dollar falls, the balance of trade deficit increases, which is increasing steadily, which further erodes the economy. Companies forced to spend more to purchase the same amount of energy a year or so ago are not able now to expand their businesses and create new jobs. In addition, electricity is going up; 20 percent of our electricity is generated by natural gas. Those prices have been surging. According to the Cato Institute, the price of residential electricity has doubled over the past 5 years, from an average of $5.43 per kilowatt hour in 2003 to $10.31 per kilowatt hour this year. A key factor is the cost of natural gas and other sources of energy.
High energy costs also drive energy-intensive businesses overseas where prices are lower. If we had passed this cap-and-trade bill that, fortunately, was blocked and pulled down after it failed to gain the necessary support, it would have driven up electric bills by as much as $100 a month for families and driven up the price of gasoline by another $1.50 per gallon according to the EPA.
Let me give an example. According to Dow Chemical Company, for every $1 increase in natural gas prices, that adds $3.7 billion in cost to the chemical industry. This will lead chemical companies to outsource their operations overseas where their feedstocks, their energy, their natural gas is cheaper. From 2003 to 2005 alone, rising natural gas prices have forced Dow to shift its production overseas, leaving the company to close 27 facilities and eliminate approximately 15 percent of its workforce.
Let me read you the latest from a Forbes magazine article on Dow and what they have done to adjust to this surge in energy prices that are some of the highest in the world, and there are a lot of lower priced areas for natural gas around the world. They are shifting their commodity lower margin business ``into joint ventures with partners in emerging markets like the Middle East, China, Russia, and Brazil. Dow contributes the technical know-how for producing plastics and chemicals, while its partners provide low-cost feedstocks''--basically natural gas--``and access to new markets. Dow ends up with lower capital expenditures and less risk.''
Well, that is jobs. That is American jobs that are going abroad, directly as a result of an increase in natural gas prices.
So I was very pleased that yesterday President Bush took an important step to address this initiative by lifting the moratorium on oil and gas exploration in the Outer Continental Shelf. With this action, the President has removed an important obstacle to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of oil, and particularly natural gas, because there is a great deal of natural gas offshore.
While the eastern Gulf of Mexico would remain off limits to exploration until 2022, this decision could potentially allow access to significant oil and natural gas reserves right here at home at a time when global supply is struggling to keep up with demand.
In 2005, this Congress directed the Department of the Interior to study the oil and gas reserves in the OCS. The study found that 8.5 billion barrels of oil and 29.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are currently known to exist off our Nation's shores. In addition, the study estimated that approximately 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas also exists in these waters.
Now, we utilize 7 billion barrels of oil a year, and approximately 4 billion of that is imported. Eighty-six billion barrels of oil lie offshore, and we have a lot of reserves onshore. If we produce that, how many years is that? Four into eighty-six? Mr. President, 25 years, 20 years of zero imports if we were to do this.
So the American Petroleum Institute reports that producing all our domestic reserves we have will provide enough oil to power 60 million cars for 60 years and enough natural gas to heat 60 million homes for 160 years. Yet these estimates are based on old data. Exploration for oil and gas reserves in the Outer Continental Shelf has not occurred since the early 1980s. Technological advances have made it possible to explore for reserves in areas previously ignored due to scientific limitations. The scientific advancement also reduces the number of dry holes. They can tell better what the prospects are when you drill a well and not drill as many dry holes. When deepwater wells cost over $1 billion, better technology is important.
By acting now to increase supply, we can be sure to reduce the price of crude oil and natural gas. This is the most reliable way to end the largest wealth transfer in history, keeping our money here at home in our economy, creating jobs here, creating taxpayers here, and improving our economy.
Let me add, parenthetically, I am not for a carbon economy. I want us to move beyond a carbon economy. But I would wish to say that 10, 15, 30 years from now we are still going to be dependent on fossil fuels. We do not have the option right now.
So I see the production of more fossil fuels at home not only as keeping American wealth at home but as a bridge to a new energy world in which we have wind and solar and biofuels, especially cellulosic ethanol that I am seeing in my home State of Alabama from wood products--I believe that has real potential--geothermal, clean coal, and nuclear power with plug-in hybrid automobiles where you plug in your car at night using clean nuclear power, with no CO2 emitted, and run your car back and forth to work, never using a drop of oil. All those things are in the works and will happen, but it does not mean we should not be productive at home.
So even with the President's decision yesterday, Congress must still take action to remove the congressional moratorium on oil and gas exploration in 85 percent of the Outer Continental Shelf. Every day Congress refuses to act is another day Americans are forced to pay higher prices at the pump.
I urge the majority leader to bring legislation to the floor that we can work on, in a bipartisan way, to lift this ban so the Senate can pass good legislation before the August recess and bring relief to the taxpayer. I cannot imagine we would fail to do that. There are a lot of things we can do right now that will not impact the environment in any negative way but will produce more energy at home and help our economy create jobs and wealth at home. I believe we can do this, and I am hopeful that will occur.
Mr. President, I see my colleague from Texas, Senator Cornyn, in the Chamber.
I am pleased to yield the floor.
