Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRIFFITH. Mr. Chairman, this is a fairly simple amendment, and it is a commonsense amendment.

While the technologies could also be used that this amendment will plus up for natural gas or oil, I will focus my attention on coal because that is what happens in my district predominantly.

Over the last several years, as many of us know, there have been numerous burdensome regulations on the coal industry and industries that burn coal.

The very least we can do is to make sure that coal-fired power plants and others dependent on coal, among those most heavily targeted, have the technologies necessary to meet the standards being imposed on them.

In recent months, I have had many conversations and discussions with a number of folks in southwest Virginia, but also folks at the Department of Energy, about ways that we can better do the research necessary to make clean coal technology available.

One thing is very clear. There is a future for coal, and it lies in many ways in the technologies being researched and supported by the Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy Research. We would love to get parity. This amendment doesn't bring us to parity, but it gets us a little bit closer.

My amendment would simply add $45 million for fossil energy research and development from the energy efficiency and renewable energy account for the purpose of aiding clean coal technology.

Now, just so you understand, the research money for energy efficiency and renewable energy would still be at $1.775 billion and the research money for fossil fuels, including coal, would only get plussed up to 690.

So you still have a greater amount of money by a little bit more than 2 to 1 going to other energies besides the fossil fuels.

Some of the key power providers in Virginia have made it clear that coal will continue to be a part of their strategy for a long time to come.

Dominion Power, at a recent conference that we had, indicated that, by 2030, they expect that about 30 percent of their energy production will be from coal. American Electric Power indicated that about half of theirs in 2030 would still be from coal.

Now, what we have to do is we have to make sure that we get our technologies in line to make sure that we can continue to burn coal, but burn it in a cleaner fashion. While there are various clean coal technologies currently in development, they will not be ready for commercial use for years to come unless we change the timeline.

So my amendment would change that timeline. It will shorten that time by putting more money into research for clean coal technologies.

So we have two intersecting interests here. Let's figure out a way we can keep the jobs, particularly in southwest Virginia and central Appalachia, and also burn coal more cleanly.

My amendment gives us a ray of hope, a step forward, to keeping those high-paying coal jobs, at least some of them--we have lost thousands in the last few years--but keeping those jobs while also finding ways to burn the coal more cleanly.

This amendment will support both of these goals by ensuring additional funding for clean coal research. That research can also be used in natural gas. My favorite is chemical looping.

This is a reasonable approach, and I hope that the body will adopt this amendment.

I appreciate that the underlying bill does provide a slight increase in fossil fuel energy research over last year's level. But when you are losing as many jobs as my district has, you have to fight for everything you can get.

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Mr. GRIFFITH. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire as to how much time I have remaining?

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Mr. GRIFFITH. Mr. Chair, I appreciate the gentlewoman's comments and recognize that they did plus it up a little bit.

But when you look at the folks that I represent and the thousands of folks who have lost their jobs in the mining industry, we have to do more. We have to do more.

Everybody likes to talk about we are going to help, we are going to transition. But some of my counties, quite frankly, what are you going to transition them to?

There are no great roads. We should work on that as well. Frankly, we have got trees and mountains. Recently, one of my counties had to build a new high school because all of their high schools were in the floodway. We had two pieces of land that were flat enough to build the high school on in the entire county.

So when people say transition, I always say: What are you going to do when you don't have the land to build factories and you don't have the resources to do something else?

They have always done mining. They can continue to do mining. Let's meet and compromise here and put research money in so that they can continue to mine, continue to have jobs, and we can have a cleaner burning fuel, but still use our coal.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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