[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 13] [Senate] [Pages 18606-18607] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]ENERGY Mr. BOND. Madam President, as America's energy needs continue to grow, so does our need for commonsense approaches to meeting these needs. Unfortunately, the Obama administration's announcement yesterday dealt a death blow to one of our most important ways to expand our domestic energy supplies. My message to the Obama administration is that we need to drill it, not kill it. Yesterday, the administration announced the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast to be off- limits to any new offshore drilling for the next 5 years. In other words, the Obama administration decided to deny Americans new domestic energy supplies, deny Americans new jobs, and make America's energy prices rise. In the wake of the BP oilspill, there is no question we are reminded of the need to preserve our environment as we seek to expand our energy growth by drilling for more oil. As we continue opening up new sources of traditional energy in an environmentally friendly manner, preventing spills must be a top priority. However, arbitrarily--arbitrarily-- closing off our own domestic supplies is not the answer. First, this deathblow to offshore drilling will only make us more dependent on OPEC and Middle Eastern countries and hostile regimes that mean us harm. Also, this moratorium will cost us jobs at a time when America needs job creation more than ever. The American Petroleum Institute estimates that we will not get 75,000 jobs as a result of the Obama administration's offshore drilling moratorium. Domestic production of energy will be integral for our economic growth. Production of domestic energy sources not only helps us meet growing demand and keeps us secure, but if the Obama administration removes their moratorium it will create jobs, and we need jobs. Strict and arbitrary environmental regulations in place on coal mining, hydraulic fracturing of natural gas, and of offshore oil drilling just create a de facto moratorium on more production and on more jobs. Limiting production will make the sources we have available only more expensive. It is simply a matter of supply and demand. As I have already mentioned, since energy demand will go up in the near future, these regulations--by hampering production--will serve as an indirect energy tax on consumers. Guess what. Remember, the $4-a- gallon gasoline we had a couple years ago? Well, we may see that, and even more, as a result of shutting off our domestic supply. We should not be jumping to constrain domestic energy production without first giving any new regulations a very strict look to make sure we do not punish consumers just trying to power their households, fuel their vehicles, get jobs, and live their lives. We all know we need a new energy policy, one that enables us to find, create, and use domestically produced clean energy. This is not the first time we have sought to do this, but the difference now is that we have a recession to contend with at the same time. People are struggling with high unemployment. In the Midwest, our manufacturing sector has lost thousands of jobs. In an economy with a stubborn, nearly 10-percent unemployment rate, the million-dollar question--or bigger than that--we all have these days is, How can we create jobs? So as we approach changing our energy policy, while we all want to protect the environment--and we must--we have to ensure that the policies we choose will not have adverse consequences to economic growth. Unfortunately, too many of my colleagues, and some in the administration, are focusing on jamming through Energy bills that would impose job-killing tax increases on farmers, small businesses, and families. Their ideas have ranged from a cap-and-trade tax bill to others that pick winners by awarding massive taxpayer-funded incentives to some and, in the process, harming others. I think there is a better way to move our Nation to energy independence. The commonsense approach we have to take would make use of the clean, reliable sources we have here without picking sources and technology winners. We need to develop affordable, homegrown, and clean energy solutions to help push our Nation toward an independent and more environmentally friendly future. I am by no means an expert on this subject, but I have been around the block a time or two, so I support many strategies to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and cut pollution. I have to stress that, in fact, we will continue to rely on fossil fuels to meet a large portion of our energy demand. Coal accounts, for example, for 50 percent of our Nation's electricity generation and over 80 percent of Missouri's electricity. So we have to harness our abundant supply of coal in a clean way by helping to advance carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS. City Utilities of Springfield, MO, and others are conducting a project to assess the feasibility of carbon sequestration in smaller, shallower saline aquifers and individual powerplants. Much of the CCS research to date has focused on deep saline aquifers in large geological basins often far removed from most powerplant sites. When complete, however, this pilot demonstration being conducted in Springfield may yield new lessons about CCS technologies that can be applied to powerplant sites in specific locations across the Nation. Nuclear power, such as coal, is also an important source of base-load power, and it must also play a role in our energy future. Nuclear energy generates more than seven times as much zero-carbon electricity as all renewable sources combined. In 2007, for example, nuclear energy prevented the emission of 693 million metric tons of carbon dioxide--roughly the equivalent of taking all U.S. passenger cars off the road. Of course, generating nuclear power results in waste that must be stored or otherwise dealt with, and we have spent billions of dollars on an improved site to store that waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Unfortunately, political opposition has stalled, perhaps permanently, the operation of that site. A real solution can be found in nuclear reprocessing, which reuses spent nuclear fuel and can produce the same amount of energy and leaves only 5 percent of the waste. France does it. Why should not we? We must have policies in place that spur the development of more zero-emission nuclear power so we can harness all of its promise. And we must eliminate the layers and layers of bureaucracy and regulations which do not add to the safety of that power produced. I agree we need to develop other zero-carbon sources, such as renewable energy sources. Missouri power providers are currently expanding their wind generation, and we have a number of wind turbines. Also, a few families and businesses receive a portion of their power from wind farms in Kansas. Every day we are making advances in solar power, but this and wind power currently require huge taxpayer subsidies just to set up the operations, and it is followed by a $20-per-megawatt taxpayer subsidy when and if they produce power. [[Page 18607]] Our State of Missouri, however, is blessed with hydropower sources which could be expanded by installing hydropower generation on existing Mississippi River locks and dams. But it is unlikely these renewable sources can provide more than a fraction of the energy we use, even in Missouri. So we must avoid national renewable energy standards that arbitrarily set requirements without ensuring that families and workers continue to receive the affordable power they need. Intermittent wind and sunlight mean we must always ensure that a reliable base source of power remains in place to back them up. Another way to make these sources more viable is through new battery technology that will help stabilize these sources' power flow. As a longtime leader in the battery industry, Missouri is also leading the way in advanced lithium-ion batter development and energy storage. For example, Dow-Kokam in Kansas City is using lithium-polymer technology to make batteries lighter, longer lasting, smaller, and quicker to charge. Not only would batteries make renewable sources more viable, they would help with peak shaving by storing large amounts of energy produced at offpeak times. When talking about batteries, of course, we cannot help but think about the promise that electric cars have to transform our transportation system and get us off our dependence of foreign oil. I am a strong supporter of the increased use of hybrid and electric vehicle technology. Smith Electric Vehicles in Kansas City is building delivery trucks, which are the world's largest electric vehicles with a top speed of 50 miles an hour and a range in excess of 100 miles on a single overnight charge of the truck's battery at a time when there is available electricity on the grid between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. not otherwise being used. But even with the promise of electric vehicles, American families, drivers, and workers still will need a plentiful supply of transportation fuels to power their cars. I do agree we eventually need to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels, and that is why I have been a longtime supporter of using renewable biomass for fuel and for energy. The biofuels industry has created good, often high-paying jobs which are critical to the Midwest where we have lost so many manufacturing jobs to the recession. I have been a longtime supporter of keeping tax incentives in place for the ethanol and biodiesel industry. These tax incentives, plus increased support for infrastructure to deliver these fuels, will be imperative as the industry becomes more competitive with traditional fuels. We must extend the volumetric excise tax credit, which we promised in the Congress to the farmers who set up the cooperatives to develop ethanol and biodiesel sources. In my opinion, one of the most exciting things about this industry is that it drives the development of low-carbon feedstocks. So I will close by talking about the potential that my home State of Missouri has to be a leader in a large part of our clean energy future by providing some of this homegrown energy, or biomass. We have made great progress in Missouri in the use of algae and carbon dioxide from fuel. Missouri also has abundant farmlands and forests that can provide diverse biomass feedstocks to generate electricity or produce renewable fuels. For example, a University of Missouri study found that Missouri's 2.5 million acres of corn and 5 million acres of soybeans produce a combined 13 million tons of dry crop residue each year which can be converted into electric energy or, through cellulosic operation, into fuels. Now, our forests alone can potentially provide 150 million tons of wood residues from scrub timber annually on a renewable basis. Together, that is a lot of biomass feedstock that is homegrown and that is carbon neutral because it takes in energy as it grows, releases that energy when it is burned, and takes it in again as replacements are grown. If we do not harness it, that energy is released when the wood or the biomass degrades. Missouri entrepreneurs are developing new technology to convert municipal solid waste into clean burning biochar, which can supplement our biomass producers. In addition, Missouri is home to some of the foremost researchers in clean-burning biomass at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Last but not least, the State of Missouri Department of Agriculture is on the cutting edge in supporting burgeoning biomass technology. By creating a thriving biomass industry, we would not only help create our clean energy future, we would also create much needed new jobs in Missouri and Midwestern States by providing income to struggling farmers and agroforesters. We must promote these clean energy strategies in a market-friendly way, and taxing our suffering families' and workers' use of energy is not the way. Produce more, do not tax more. Taxing it does not increase the production of it. Promoting these clean energy strategies is a bipartisan win-win-win, and I hope all of my colleagues will join me in helping this become a reality. Madam President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum. The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Florida. Mr. NELSON of Florida. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered. ____________________