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Obama Takes Pro-Natural Gas Message on the Road
With his third State of the Union speech behind him and the election that could deliver him a second term just over 10 months away, President Obama has taken his “Blueprint for an America Built to Last” on the road, promoting “an all-out, all-of-the-above” energy strategy to audiences in Arizona, Nevada and Colorado.
In the State of the Union speech Tuesday night, Obama for the first time issued a strong call for development of domestic natural gas and oil as part of his energy strategy, declaring that his administration “will take every possible action to safely develop” natural gas (see Daily GPI, Jan. 26).
“We’ve got a supply of natural gas under our feet that can last America nearly 100 years,” Obama told workers at a UPS facility in Las Vegas, NV, Thursday. “Developing it could power our cars and our homes and our factories in a cleaner and cheaper way. The experts believe it could support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade.
“We, it turns out, are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.”
While Obama gave a nod to those with environmental concerns — “I’m requiring for the first time ever that all companies drilling for gas on public lands disclose the chemicals they use” — he reiterated a basic energy message from Tuesday night’s speech: “We’ve got to take advantage of this incredible natural resource.”
The United States could become a country where more vehicles are fueled by natural gas than by foreign oil, where energy companies lead the world in developing natural gas technologies and where manufacturers become more competitive through the use of natural gas, Obama said.
UPS and 13 other companies have put more than a million alternative fuel vehicles on the road since last April in response to an administration challenge. “That’s a lot of trucks — we should do more though,” Obama said. In an effort to get more natural gas vehicles (NGV) on the road, both federal and local government fleets should be converted to natural gas; tax incentives should be offered to help companies buy more NGVs; and more natural gas refueling stations should be built across the country, Obama said.
“We’re going to keep working with the private sector to develop up to five natural gas corridors along our highways,” he said.
Obama also called on Energy Secretary Steven Chu to launch a competition to encourage scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to find breakthroughs for natural gas vehicles.
“Building out our natural gas transportation infrastructure, developing natural gas vehicles and promoting the use of natural gas for fleets are all things that ANGA [America’s Natural gas Alliance] members, other major U.S. companies and local and state leaders across the country have been doing enthusiastically,” said ANGA CEO Regina Hopper. “We agree that there is a tremendous opportunity to increase the number of clean natural gas vehicles on our highways. We applaud companies like UPS, AT&T, Verizon and others that are driving change by embracing this affordable, domestic energy source for their transportation fleets. And we support greater NGV use in federal fleets.”
Also on Thursday, the administration said the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will hold consolidated Central Gulf of Mexico Lease Sale 216/222 in New Orleans on June 20 (see related story). The proposed oil and gas lease sale will include all available unleased areas in the Central Planning Area offshore Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and make nearly 38 million acres available, BOEM said.
Meanwhile, did the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) not get the memo about the administration’s new all-out support for domestic oil and gas? Cabot Corp. suggested that might be the case, noting that the agency appears to be running counter to the message with its unexplained action recently to reopen the long-running Dimock, PA, water well saga.
The case had apparently been closed for all but a few homeowners who refused the state-approved settlement with Cabot, plus an environmental cadre. But in spite of extensive state tests and studies previously made available to the agency, EPA has decided to retest Dimock water. “EPA’s actions in Dimock appear to undercut the president’s stated commitment to this important resource..,” Cabot Chairman Dan O. Dinges said in a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.
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