Political Quotes

“Four times more natural gas is available in areas already open to drilling. Let me reiterate that. In areas already approved and open for drilling, four times more natural gas is available than in OCS waters protected by the moratorium. In other words, that which is protected has only 25 percent perceived to be available than does the already approved available Outer Continental Shelf areas. So if we started vigorously pursuing exploration and drilling in those areas, we'd get 75 percent more than we get now. In fact, the figure is that we are using only 18 percent of the 7,740 active leases currently available on the Outer Continental Shelf, only 1,655 are in production; so that when we talk about the problem is that the Democrats are not allowing us to drill and explore and to recover resources that are in our Outer Continental Shelf or on our lower 48, that is not, I think, accurate. I think it's not accurate because of the extraordinarily high percentage of currently approved leaseholds that are not being utilized in this very day.”