A group of western business leaders said Friday that it disagrees with Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s encouragement of increased foreign LNG shipments as a means of improving domestic gas supply. The Western Business Roundtable said the answer does not lie in foreign imports.

“With all due respect to Chairman Greenspan, we think his advice to Congress misses the mark,” said Jack Ekstrom, an executive with Evergreen Resources, Inc. and chair of the Western Business Roundtable’s Energy Committee. “The answer to potential natural gas shortages is not to make America even more reliant on foreign energy. It is to produce more energy here at home.”

Earlier in the week, Greenspan told a House committee that if the United States wanted to maintain its current standard of living, it would have to become a bigger player in the global gas market by importing more liquefied natural gas (see Daily GPI, June 11).

“Chairman Greenspan has helped to identify a critical problem facing our economy, and he should be commended for that. But I think most Americans reject the notion that we should build huge new LNG terminals at U.S. ports and encourage more LNG tankers to park in harbors near U.S. population centers,” Ekstrom said. “National security concerns can and do figure prominently in today’s energy policy debate, and those concerns ought to cast a long shadow on the LNG option.

“The Chairman acknowledged that we have very significant reserves of domestic energy here at home. We need to focus on increasing production of those reserves instead of importing energy from foreign nations that clearly do not have America’s best interests at heart,” Elkstrom added. “America needs more American energy now. That should be the focus of policymakers.”

Ekstrom said that the Western Business Roundtable is urging Congress to encourage more domestic production of natural gas through a variety of regulatory reforms and to broaden the portfolio of domestic fuels that are used to generate electricity in the United States. The group also called for the country to more fully utilize existing generation fueled from domestic resources by modernizing and expanding the nation’s high-voltage electricity transmission infrastructure.

“We need to increase production of our clean and domestic natural gas supplies,” he said. “But we also need to achieve a more balanced fuel portfolio for new electricity generation. We need that portfolio to include coal, nuclear, renewable and natural gas resources. And key to balancing that portfolio is building more transmission lines in this country.”

Specifically, Ekstrom said that the coalition is recommending the following to Congress:

The organization also believes Congress should encourage diversification of the fuel resources used for electricity generation by:

The Western Business Roundtable said it represents a broad cross section of Western business interests, including those engaged in construction, conventional and renewable energy development, electric power generation, oil and gas exploration and development, engineering, financial, accounting, manufacturing, mining, utility and others.

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