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Floor Speech

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Mr. MULLIN. Mr. President, thank you and thank you to the Senator from Alabama for doing this.

I think it is very important that we understand what is happening in our economy right now with the energy issue and the energy crisis we find ourselves in.

And so the bill that I bring forward today is Protecting American Energy Production Act.

It is real simple. It allows us to be energy independent. The backbone of our economy is energy, and if you have high energy costs, which we have had a 37-percent increase in energy under this current administration, you obviously are going to have inflation increase because energy is the backbone of our economy. You cannot make a product, nor can you deliver the product, without factoring in the cost of energy.

With a 37-percent energy increase over the last 4 years, we have to bring back that resilience. We have to bring back that energy independence. And the way we do that is we understand real numbers.

For instance, in 2019, fracking, which our current Vice President has been on record saying that she wants to ban fracking, in 2019, fracking accounted for 63 percent of our total crude oil production and 75 percent of our natural gas supply.

Underneath the current administration, we have seen a significant decline in fracking wells. At the same time, we haven't seen demand decrease, we have actually seen demand increase, which by the amount that has actually been taken away from oil or from American producers, now we have seen an increase in imports.

Not all of them are friends of ours. As I said, the bill is very simple, Protecting American Energy Production Act.

So as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 1121 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

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Mr. MULLIN. Reserve the right to object.

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Mr. MULLIN. While I understand my colleague from Oregon, where he stands on this issue, there are just some factual things that need to be checked on that.

One, he said that we are the No. 1 exporter of gas. That is just not true. Russia is the No. 1 exporter of gas.

When they say production has increased, that is actually not accurate either. Could we have been the largest liquefied natural gas exporter? Yes. That was until the permits for the pipelines to go to export terminals in Louisiana were canceled, which put a lot of our allies in Europe in a situation to where now they had to go buy gas from a bad actor that is right now invading Ukraine called Russia.

Our allies do not want to be dependent, obviously, on Russia. They would love to have our gas.

And as far as being the No. 1 seller to China with crude and refined products, it is not true again. At current rate, Iran is the No. 1 seller to China, and they are the ones that are buying it because of the Biden-Harris administration being extremely weak on the sanctions that we put on Iran under the Trump administration--which now Iran is actively funding the Houthis and Hamas and terrorist organizations all around the world.

What we are saying is: Let our allies count on us. We have more reserves underneath our feet, and we can produce it cleaner and more efficient than OPEC, than Russia, than Iran. Our allies want to do business with us, and our economy desperately needs it. We are in a recession, and no one is denying that. Why should we depend on allowing OPEC to set the world price for crude? Why are we allowing them to set the price and become rich off of our backs when we ourselves could easily do that in a much cleaner and more efficient way?

Why are we still importing petroleum products from Russia? Why are we still importing oil, which is a dirty crude, from Saudi Arabia, when we can still produce it--a sweet crude--that comes out of Oklahoma, that comes out of North Dakota, that comes out of Pennsylvania, that comes out of Texas, that is a much easier product to refine and burns cleaner. And there is no denying that.

Because the world's demand for fossil fuels is increasing not decreasing--so why are we doing it at the cost of the American taxpayer? Why are we hurting our economy along the way?

As far as the change that my colleague from Oregon wants to do, it is not necessary. The change isn't there. This is just to try to kill the bill because the legislation that my colleague is trying to do--we already know that the President, currently, already has the authority to restrict oil and gas exports because he did exactly that earlier this year, which is why I brought up Louisiana.

All this does is deflect blame away from the Biden-Harris administration, which has been very soft on sanctions with bad actors-- as I mentioned, Iran. The majority of which are bought, as I mentioned before, by China. And as I mentioned before, this does nothing but enable Iran, when they sell their product, to sponsor the largest groups around the world operating in terror organizations.

The bill my colleague from Oregon is raising today would do nothing to address the massive amounts of Russian oil flowing into China, and what Republicans are trying to do here today is bolster American energy production by preventing this administration and future administrations from banning fracking.

As I said, as the current Vice President openly said in 2019, she was 100 percent for banning fracking across the United States.

So with that, I have to object to my colleague from Oregon's legislation and changes to my current bill.

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Mr. MULLIN. Mr. President, one quick response to this: My colleague is correct about the LNG, or liquefied natural gas. What my colleague said in his remarks was ``natural gas.''

Natural gas is much different than shipping liquefied natural gas. Liquefied natural gas is a small percentage of what is exported and as far as what we call natural gas. Once it is liquefied, what actually is by far the biggest is the pipeline that this administration approved, which President Trump put a hold on, going into Germany for the second time.

So my original statement is true: Russia is the largest exporter of natural gas.

Once again, this wasn't to do anything, as my colleague said, talking about China. The export ban which the administration put on the exporting of LNG out of Louisiana by canceling the permits, that has affected Europe. They are allies of ours.

If this administration wanted to do something about China, they could do it today. They could do it this hour. They could do it right now by an executive order. Last I checked, they still had the authority to do so.

So as I go back to my colleague from Oregon's change to my current bill, the modification does nothing. The current administration, currently, already has that authority.

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Mr. MULLIN. Madam President, it is interesting to me that my colleague from Massachusetts is lecturing us on energy prices when the last time I checked, Massachusetts has the highest cost of energy to heat their homes in the Nation; when he starts calling fracking a dinosaur technology, when the last time I checked, Boston had one of the collective largest group of individuals still heating their homes off heating oil and propane.

Infrastructure is what creates an opportunity to bring down energy costs, which is why Oklahoma, on the other hand, which embraces fracking and embraces pipelines, has the lowest energy cost on average around the country.

So if we really want to talk about bringing down cost for consumers, let's look at a model that works instead of having someone lecture us from a State that their model doesn't work. We can build infrastructure. We would love to build pipelines in Massachusetts, but they block them. The infrastructure would be awesome.

I know there is a tremendous amount of companies that would love to supply natural gas to Massachusetts. In fact, there is a pipeline right now ready to go that has been blocked.

So let's have some serious conversations, not just lay blame and call CEOs bad names and give false opinions that they are just wanting to export. This says nothing about exporting. This is talking about becoming energy independent so we don't have to import oil, so we don't have to import refined products. This is about becoming energy dependent so we can bring down energy cost.

As I said earlier, the current policy that we are operating under with the Biden-Harris administration has brought energy costs up by 37 percent, which is directly affecting every single American's pocketbook today, right now as we speak. That is why every single American out there is paying $1,085 more per month in their household bills and grocery bills than they were 4 years ago, which, if you think about that, that is over $13,000 a year directly reflecting our current energy policy.

This does exactly what it is supposed to do: help bring down the energy cost and inflation will follow. It is not hard math; it is common sense.

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