Lee Terry: “I thank the gentleman from Texas. I do appreciate your insight and your support. Let me take this opportunity--we've had…”

“I thank the gentleman from Texas. I do appreciate your insight and your support. Let me take this opportunity--we've had two speakers already that have talked in support of the Keystone pipeline. Now let me give kind of a tutorial of what we're talking about. It is a 1,700-mile pipeline from the oil sands of Alberta coming down through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and as our two previous speakers said, then down into southeast Texas and Louisiana, where most of the refineries are. It will break off at different points in Kansas and then also to the east, to other refineries. But there are very few refineries in the Midwest. So most of the refineries will then refine this into a variety of fuels--mostly for our automobiles, and then diesel and aviation fuel as well. It will produce 700,000 barrels per day once it's built. What does that mean to us by way of energy security? Well, first of all, we import on a daily basis almost 900,000 barrels of oil per day from Venezuela. So this one pipeline, starting in Canada, ending in Texas, would nearly offset 100 percent of what we import to this country from Venezuela. Our reliance on OPEC oil--our major OPEC exporter to us is Saudi Arabia, where they export around 1.2 million barrels per day. Now when this is fully built and the oil sands are really humming, they think they can get up to 1.1 million per day through this pipeline. {time} 1500 That then would nearly offset what we have to buy from Saudi Arabia.…”