On the recordJune 20, 2018
I thank Congressman Olson for his leadership as vice chairman of the subcommittee and a tireless leader on behalf of energy in this country. Also, I want to thank Congressman Johnson for his strong efforts and also compliment him on his playing in last week's Congressional Baseball Game. Congressman Duncan was also on the team and played well as shortstop. Oil was discovered in Pennsylvania back in the mid-1800s. As the oil industry began to develop, they more and more would run into what we would today call associated gas. Every now and then while drilling for oil they would hit a well that didn't have any oil, but all it had was what today we call natural gas. They didn't know what to do with it. They used the oil to make kerosene, lubricants, and home heating oil and things like that, but they didn't have a real purpose for natural gas. So they would just flare it, just literally in the field, light a match, put a flare pipe up and flare it. As time went on, they discovered that it had a fairly high Btu energy content, and they discovered a way to contain it, to store it, and to transport it through pipelines. Because it was a gas, it was not a liquid in its natural state, so while it was not as valuable as oil, it had enough value that it was worth looking for and worth keeping. You rock along and you rock along, and in the 1950s and 1960s, we began to set price controls on natural gas in interstate commerce.…
