Joe Barton: “I thank the gentleman from Midland, Texas, the chairman of the Agriculture Committee and a stalwart original sponsor of…”

“I thank the gentleman from Midland, Texas, the chairman of the Agriculture Committee and a stalwart original sponsor of the bill. I appreciate your leadership, and I appreciate you doing this Special Order. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow we are going to have a debate on H.R. 702. It is a bill to repeal the ban on crude oil exports. This is the last remnant of the 1970s era energy policy for America that said we were running out of energy and that the only way to use the energy we did have was to keep it in the United States. As a consequence of the Arab oil embargo, we had price controls on oil. We had price controls on natural gas. We had limits on what natural gas could be used for. We had a very restrictive, defeatist, in my opinion, energy policy. All that has been repealed except for one thing, and that is this ban on crude oil exports. There are a number of opinions about why that has not been repealed, but I think the primary reason is that, until the last 5 years, Mr. Speaker, we really didn't have a significant amount of oil that could be exported. But a funny thing happened. Some engineers in Texas--I have to give my State credit--developed two technologies, one called hydraulic fracturing where you pressurize a formation, and another where you can turn the drill bit and drill horizontally.…”