Energy Security 101

Americans burn 490 million gallons of gasoline and diesel every day and import 65 percent of the oil used to make those products. Worldwide energy consumption is expected to increase 40 percent in the next 25 years, and widespread adoption of alternative energy sources is decades away. Because America will need to rely on energy that comes from natural gas and oil for the foreseeable future, the energy legislation pending in Congress could be disastrous for our country.

If this legislation is finalized and sent to President Bush as the House passed it, it could hurt, not help, America by building barriers to production of domestic energy supplies. In the face of expanding global demand for energy, this legislation defies logic.

America's undeveloped oil and gas resources should be considered our generation's victory garden in the face of today's struggle to maintain energy security. Innovative technology is bringing on line oil and gas production from heretofore noncommercial and unconventional geological reservoirs. Such technology is on the verge of unleashing vast new supplies of oil and gas.

It stands to reason that a rational and responsible federal government would craft energy policies that nurture the growth and development of this exciting potential energy supply. Yet Congress is slamming the door on development of large domestic reserves of hydrocarbons.

This is not the first time that anti-oil demagoguery has produced misguided legislation. Today's rhetoric is an echo of what we heard in the late 1970s. Cries for windfall-profits taxes and price controls led to misguided policies then and squelched any coherent energy policy discussion. We shouldn't repeat those mistakes.

For America to achieve energy stability and security, federal policymakers must cast off '70s thinking and learn from the recent experiences of energy-producing states such as Texas. A new era of oil and gas exploration has begun. Technologies such as horizontal drilling require only a fraction of the "footprint" once used for well sites. Using best practices, drilling and production today are much cleaner and far more efficient than in the past.

The Texas Railroad Commission has overseen oil and gas exploration in the state for more than 90 years. Texas's energy policies, crafted over decades, encourage the use of advanced technology. The state recognizes the importance of access to private and state-owned lands and acknowledges the role that risk plays in drilling prospects.

Strict environmental rules and targeted tax credits for drilling in hard-to-reach reservoirs are tools that have kept Texas the nation's top producer of oil and natural gas. Important new gas fields have been developed in areas that geologists once considered goat pasture. The shining star is the Barnett Shale play, a 16-county swath of north-central Texas that includes Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and the communities surrounding it. Advanced exploration techniques have transformed this once marginal trend into a giant. The Barnett Shale, which produces 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, may become the largest natural gas field in the country. Similarly, increased demand has generated interest in using technology to bring mature oil fields back to life.

Energy development in Texas has been achieved mostly on privately owned property. Why can't our federal lands be used as productively? The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge may offer oil reserves of as much as 16 billion barrels -- which is comparable to the world's largest oil fields. Even though the environmental impact would be minuscule, Congress insists on keeping the refuge and other potential domestic resources off-limits and ignores the fact that modern exploration techniques could limit drilling in the refuge to a 2,000-acre footprint, or not even half of 1 percent of the refuge's 19 million acres. Similarly, America's vast offshore oil and gas reserves in the outer continental shelf remain mostly off-limits to exploration, but successful wells would provide revenue that could be used to fund development of alternative sources of energy for decades to come.

Our country's energy dependency makes us dangerously vulnerable in economic terms and compromises our national security. Public policies that support rather than impede efforts to increase responsible domestic production are what America needs to retake control of its energy lifeblood from rogue dictators and banana republics.

Elizabeth Ames Jones is a member and immediate past chairman of theTexas Railroad Commission, which regulates the state's oil and gas, propane, mining, and intrastate pipeline industries.