Mike Conaway: “I appreciate the leadership allowing me to visit with you about something that is near and dear to my heart. I hope we…”

“I appreciate the leadership allowing me to visit with you about something that is near and dear to my heart. I hope we spend the better part of the next hour discussing a bill tomorrow that will be before this body, which is H.R. 702, which would lift the 40-year-old, decades-old ban on exporting a domestic product, a domestic commodity, called crude oil. As you look at the things that America buys and sells around the world, the only commodity that we produce here in the United States that we cannot export is crude oil. It harkens back to 40 years ago, and I will talk about it in a second. There are no restrictions on imports. You could import all the crude oil that you would like, but we have a restriction on exporting that crude oil. Now, the administration recently signaled a bit of a change in that in that they licensed a swap of certain number of barrels of heavy crude from Mexico for light sweet crude coming to the United States. So there was at least one opportunity recently where the Department of Commerce authorized that swap and, in effect, began to export some of this crude that we produce every single day.…”