House Passes Oil-Drilling Bill That Requires OK for Pipeline

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved an energy bill that would require President Obama to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline to carry crude oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries.

The Keystone provision was contained in an energy bill that also would expand oil drilling offshore and in the Alaska wilderness. House Republican leaders said the revenue would help pay for infrastructure spending in transportation reauthorization legislation.

Approved on a 237-187 vote Feb. 16, the bill is what Republicans called the revenue portion of their five-year, $260 billion highway bill.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said the reauthorization bill would create jobs “by removing government barriers to long-term economic growth, particularly, in the production of American-made energy.”

Democrats, however, sharply criticized the energy bill, saying it would generate only 1% of the revenue needed to pay for the Republicans’ transportation bill.

“These bills provide phantom revenue from phantom drilling that will never occur, all to fund a sham of a transportation bill,” said Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee.

“In exchange for this paltry contribution to the transportation bill that looks ever likelier to crash and burn, Americans are being told to open up the beaches off the East and West coasts and Florida, and the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” Markey said in a statement after the House vote.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated there is a $78 billion shortfall in the transportation bill that has yet to be voted on and said royalties from expanding oil drilling offshore and in Alaska would generate less than $5 billion.

The energy bill also would open areas of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming to oil shale drilling that Democrats said would be experimental and make those states “guinea pigs.”

Markey and other House Democrats offered an amendment, which was rejected, to the Keystone provision. The amendment stated that, if constructed, the pipeline must be made of American steel, and the oil flowing through must be sold in the United States, rather than exported to China and other overseas markets.

Under the terms of the bill, Obama would have to lift the current moratorium on the pipeline, which would transport crude to the Gulf Coast from oil sands in Alberta, Canada, and from drilling in North Dakota.

Environmentalists have objected to the route, as well as to extraction in the oil sands, a process they say produces excessive greenhouse gas emissions. Backers of the pipeline and oil sands extraction have said oil can be extracted in ways that reduce emissions.

On the Senate side, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said he will try to get a Keystone bill attached as an amendment to the transportation bill being considered in that chamber. The two-year, $109 billion Senate bill is expected to be voted on this week.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), one of four senators who wrote the Senate’s transportation bill, urged colleagues not to attach what she in a press release called “non-germane” amendments.

“Listen, we have to put aside these wedge issues, these ‘gotcha’ issues,” Boxer said on the Senate floor Feb. 13.

Likewise, 27 trade, business and manufacturing organizations signed a letter to the senators asking them to immediately act on the highway reauthorization bill and “abstain from offering non-germane amendments that would impede passage of the legislation, which is essential to job creation, economic growth and to the long term stability of vital transportation programs.”

Among the groups signing the letter were American Trucking Associations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and various building and materials suppliers.