On the recordFebruary 14, 2011
I rise today to introduce the Deepwater Drilling Royalty Relief Prohibition Act. The purpose of this bill is to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to incentivize the dangerous and often dirty business of offshore drilling in deep waters. Over the past two decades, Congress has established a number of royalty-relief programs to encourage domestic exploration and production in deep waters. This may have made sense in times when oil prices were too low to provide energy companies with an incentive to drill in difficult places. It may have made sense before we were ready to deploy large scale renewable energy production. But it no longer makes sense today. The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe showed that safety and response technologies are not sufficient in deep waters. The President's National Oil Spill Commission pointed out that while offshore oil and gas will remain part of the nation's energy portfolio for years to come, we need to 'begin a transition to a cleaner, more energy-efficient future.' I agree. I believe that taxpayer-funded incentives should go to clean, renewable energy, not deepwater oil drilling.
