Nick Rahall: “And as is the case with onshore, out of the 40 million acres currently being held by oil and gas companies, under lease…”

“And as is the case with onshore, out of the 40 million acres currently being held by oil and gas companies, under lease, in the Outer Continental Shelf, the oil and gas industry has put less than 7 million of those acres into production. It's already there. It's available to them. Yet they're not using it, and they want to go elsewhere to drill. In a nutshell, the industry has access to most of the estimated technologically recoverable natural gas that's occurring in the Federal OCS, in fact four times as much as is estimated by the Minerals Management Service to occur in the moratoria areas, but the industry is not developing it. You cannot drill your way to lower gas prices at the pump. The industry has plenty available to them. Let them use what they already have before going into other pristine areas like ANWR.”