Reported in Congressional Quarterly, House Republican leaders want to establish a 16-member commission that would aim to wean North America off imported oil by 2025.
The new proposal is included in a draft of this year’s comprehensive energy legislation from the House Resources Committee. The bill would establish a panel of industry experts “armed with a $10 million budget” that would make recommendations to the White House for energy self-sufficiency within Canada, Mexico and the United States.
According to the draft language, the panel’s members would be “knowledgeable on energy issues,” such as oil and gas exploration, electricity production and energy efficiency. House and Senate leaders would provide nominations for 12 of the slots, while the White House would nominate the remaining four. The president would appoint them, including a chairman who would guide spending.
The panel, named the Commission on North American Energy Freedom, would use its budget to hire staff and consultants and also would form a science and technical advisory panel, the draft says. The commission would hold its first meeting within 30 days of the appointments and submit to Congress a report within a year of the bill’s approval. The bill calls for the president and Congress to act swiftly on the recommendations to pass a “long-range national policy to achieve North American energy freedom by 2025.”
Industry lobbyists said the committee draft would also give oil and gas producers more royalty breaks when they drill in federal waters. And as expected, it calls on the secretary of the Interior to open a small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing.
But expanding drilling in disputed areas of the country would go only so far under the House bill. The draft does not include a plan supported by Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, to conduct an inventory of oil and gas resources on the Outer Continental Shelf, including areas now off-limits from drilling because of administrative and congressional moratoriums.
The House in October 2003 sent a strong signal to the White House and congressional leaders when it voted 229-182 to oppose such an inventory. An inventory plan was included in the 2003 Republican Senate energy proposal (S 14), but even pro-industry House members rejected that part of the measure.
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