Roy Blunt: “And two is the numbers I see for the deep water drilling of natural gas indicate that there is an 18-year supply in the…”

“And two is the numbers I see for the deep water drilling of natural gas indicate that there is an 18-year supply in the deep water. If you're right, and there's four times that supply on public lands that could be drilled on, I suppose that means we have almost a 100-year supply of natural gas if we just go after it. We should find out whatever it takes to go after that, and insist that that happen. My view is both, and wherever the infrastructure is most amenable to getting that natural gas and oil into the energy system the quickest, that's where we should be drilling the quickest. If we've got a leasehold that's 500 miles away from the nearest place you can hook it up to a line, that's probably less appealing than a leasehold somewhere in the deep water or other places that's near a current way to get that gas or that oil into the system. I do know in the 181 area that we opened in 2006 in the gulf, opened for a brief period of time, that there's one 2-acre platform there, at least I'm told there's a 2-acre platform there that's producing roughly 10 percent of all the natural gas that we're producing in the United States of America. I do believe that these resources are greater than we thought they were 5 or 10 years ago. I think we ought to be pursuing that on all fronts.”