Advanced Geothermal Innovation Leadership Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I have polled the Members of the Energy Committee and now withdraw the committee-reported substitute amendment.

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I call up substitute amendment No. 1407.
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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I thank all of those who just voted for the motion to proceed to S. 2657. We have called up my substitute amendment, No. 1407, which now contains the full text of the American Energy Innovation Act.

We are moving through the process, albeit a little slowly here, but we are moving through the process. We now have more than 150 amendments that have been filed to the bill. Senator Manchin and I are working together with other Members to sort through potential votes on the bill. We are also working to see which ones might fit into a managers' package of easy, noncontroversial, worked-out proposals. I know everyone thinks that theirs is easy and that it has been worked out, and, of course, it is not controversial, but we have a handful of those proposals and are seeking additional ones.

I would remind Members that amendments require bipartisan cooperation, especially from those beyond the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources' jurisdiction. Those who are on the committee have had an opportunity to go through each and every one of these measures that we have in front of us and that have been incorporated as part of this American Energy Innovation Act. That input has been helpful and very, very positive as we have built these proposals. I know some folks are looking at much of this for the first time if they are not on the committee. They have ideas that are good and worthy, and we want to respect that process and incorporate them as appropriate and enhance this bill.

I want to have votes. The leader has said he wants to have an open amendment process. I want to have a managers' package, but it is entirely possible--we have seen it before--that the opportunity will be spoiled. I would just urge Members to be honest about how ready their proposals really are. Sometimes, they might not be as vetted as you think they might be, and they might need some additional work, but know that, as a committee, we stand ready to work with Members on those proposals to better enhance them.

I have taken the opportunity over the past couple of days to share with colleagues more about what our package includes--the result of this good work that we have done over the past year in working through regular order in our committee. Last night, I talked about title I, which focuses on innovation--the big, key buzzword here, ``innovation''--everything from energy efficiency and renewables to energy storage. We all talk a lot about energy storage--advanced nuclear and carbon capture, utilization, and storage. So there is a good focus on the innovation side of this bill.

This morning, I would like to highlight what is in title II, which is kind of our security title, and I put it in three different buckets. You have mineral security, which is critical to the supply chain. You have cyber security and grid security, which, again, are key to all operations of commerce and our economy. Then you have the economic security that comes with good jobs. The focus on the workforce is here as well.

Out of these three, I begin with mineral security, because we don't always associate these efforts with meeting our energy and our climate goals.

What we focus on within this bill is the development of new, clean technologies, but there is also a very important reality that we have to acknowledge, which is that meeting our energy and our climate goals will require a significant increase in our supply of critical minerals. The world is not producing nearly enough of almost all of them. Think about that. We are pushing and challenging those within our national labs and those within the private sector and are saying: Move us to these cleaner technologies--the world of renewables. Yet we have to build all of these things. Whether it is your smartphone or whether it is a wind turbine, we need to build them, and they require minerals-- they require critical minerals.

If we are not producing them, where are we getting them from? More to the point, the United States is not producing nearly enough of almost any of these materials that we are talking about when it comes to how we move to clean energy sources. We are largely absent from the field, as countries--most notably, China--increasingly dominate long-term supply chains that will give them an almost insurmountable competitive advantage.

Consider a few of the numbers here. According to the World Bank, meeting the goals that have been set by the Paris Agreement would increase demand for battery storage minerals, like lithium, cobalt, and nickel, by 1,000 percent. Right now, nearly 70 percent of raw cobalt is coming from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and over 60 percent of the processed cobalt used in batteries is controlled by China. Think about that. The United States has no capacity for battery-grade cobalt. That is the situation we are in right now. There is no capacity for battery-grade cobalt here in this country, and that is before the projected 600-percent increase in demand over the next 30 years.

Despite new development on State and private lands in Nevada and North Carolina, the United States only produces about one percent of the world's raw lithium and contributes about seven percent of the processed materials. Think about it--the cobalt that is so necessary and the lithium that we require for our batteries. The same goes for graphite, whereby 60 percent of mined graphite and 100 percent of the processed material is coming from China. We have some very promising reserves in my State of Alaska for graphite. Again, think about what this means when we are talking about solar panels, advanced batteries, and electric vehicles. What are they made of? It is not chocolate and candy canes here. If we want to compete in the industries of the future, we are going to have to do better. We will have to compete with China, particularly, and right now, we are at a disadvantage.

Last year, an expert from the Foreign Policy Analytics testified about China's domination of mineral markets and supply chains. For electric vehicles, China controls or has influence over 80 percent of the supply of rare earth elements. China also controls or has influence over 70 percent of the supply of graphite and graphene, 59 percent of the supply of lithium, 56 percent of the supply of vanadium, and 36 percent of the supply of cobalt.

Some of this is due to the production and supply chains in China. Some of it is as a result of extensive investments that China has made to acquire mines and mining interests around the world, most notably in places like the Congo. Yet this is the reality that we are facing right now--this ever-increasing reliance on and, therefore, vulnerability for these minerals that are so necessary to the investments that we will make.

It is not just China we are talking about here. Canada is well ahead of us. Just this week, Prime Minister Trudeau released the Canadian Minerals and Metals Plan, with the goal of ``being the leading mining nation,'' in part, because minerals are critical to clean energy technologies.

So while other countries are competing to lead in this space, what are we doing here in this country? How are we doing it?

Now, I want to give the administration credit in this space. They recognize the problem. They are acting on it. The President laid down an Executive order. I just visited with the Secretary of the Interior on their minerals analysis, but, really, the facts in front of us are pretty clear.

USGS tells us this every year: We are still a long, long way from true mineral security. Right now, we import at least 50 percent of our supply of 46 different minerals, including 100 percent of 17 of them.

This is like the Achilles' heel for us because we have effectively surrendered the front end of the supply chain, and then we wonder why we have such a hard time capturing any of the rest of it.

So our mineral subtitle will help put us on the right track. It is not an overnight cure-all; there is none. But it will enable the United States to increase the responsible production and processing of critical minerals. It will help us figure out what we have. It will help us develop alternatives and substitutes for the minerals that we lack, and that is an important part of this because, as much as it is important to have that secure supply here, we need to be pushing ourselves to recycle, to find the alternatives and the substitutes. That is key and folds into the first title, which is all about innovation and the technologies that will help us advance that but keeping and pushing on the R&D in that space.

Then, also, what we do within the bill is increase recycling to reduce the need for new supplies. So you have a focus on mineral security, but how that ties into innovation and how we can reuse, recycle, and develop alternatives is key.

Over time, our mineral subtitle will help America become a leader in growing industries like battery and renewable manufacturing, along with the jobs and the economic growth that they represent.

I think it also helps put the United States in the driver's seat to prevent supply disruptions that could quickly derail our efforts to deploy renewables, energy storage, EVs, and other technologies.

There is one thing our minerals subtitle will not do. It will not weaken laws that protect our lands and waters. Our bill continues to ensure that only responsible development is allowed to proceed.

I have heard some claim just as recently as yesterday that our bill will somehow weaken the environmental review process, but know that that is not accurate. That is simply wrong.

The United States, right now, has one of the slowest permitting processes in the world--in the world. Some years back we were dead last; we were actually tied with Papua New Guinea. We do not have a permitting process that is the envy of anyone. It is entirely fair to encourage agencies to do better, like their counterparts all around the world, by working smarter and more efficiently.

I also want to remind colleagues that we passed this same provision as part of our 2016 energy bill. Minerals were important enough to draw 85 votes back then, in 2016, so I would think that we would regard them as even more important now as our reliance and our vulnerability have only increased.

I want to thank Senator Manchin for his support on our efforts on mineral security and for his cosponsorship of the American Mineral Security Act. I was also glad to be able to combine his efforts on a bill that he called Rare Earth Element Advanced Coal Technologies. We have included that bill in our subtitle.

I also want to thank a number of members on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee--Senators Barrasso, Risch, Daines, and McSally--for their help in this very important subtitle.

Another subtitle within title II on security addresses the real and growing threat of cyber attacks. According to the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, China, Russia, and other foreign adversaries are using cyber operations to target our critical energy infrastructure.

We have already seen the real-world ramifications of cyber attacks on energy infrastructure. In December of 2015, Russian hackers cut off power to nearly a quarter of a million people in Ukraine. Two years later, Russian hackers infiltrated the industrial control system of a Saudi Arabian petrochemical plant and disabled the plant's safety systems. We can't let that happen here.

Our electric grid, which is composed of generation, transmission, and distribution resources, is a uniquely critical asset. Every sector of our economy depends on it. We know what the impact would be if there were a successful hack. It could impact homes, hospitals, banks, gas pumps, traffic lights, cell phone services. The consequences really go without bounds in terms of the devastation that could be wrought, particularly if power can't be restored for any meaningful duration.

So, working with the administration, we have seen some good steps to address this through the establishment of the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Responses, also known as CESER, at the Department of Energy. I thank them for the leadership there. This office is really pretty busy preparing for and responding to more and increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

Our innovation package builds on that effort through a bill called the PROTECT Act, which will enhance cyber security defenses of grid assets by providing incentives, grants, and technical assistance for utilities to invest in cutting-edge technologies.

The innovation package will also allow all utilities and power producers, especially those most vulnerable smaller utilities that have fewer resources, to continue investing in new technology that keeps their systems protected against evolving cyber threats.

This is important because we tend to focus on the big systems and what that impact might be, but for many, many, many around the country in our smaller, more rural areas, these are our smaller utilities that don't have the resources to really be as current or as protected as they want to be and as they should be in the event of any kind of cyber threat. So helping assist them is important.

We included language from Senator Gardner to facilitate State energy security plans and public-private partnerships for grid security. We included Senator Cantwell's Energy Cybersecurity Act, which puts programs in place for the DOE to effectively partner with industry and other Federal agencies.

Senator Cantwell has been a real leader--when she was the ranking member on the committee and now--as she continues to focus on this issue, the very important issue of cybersecurity. So she has a good provision included in this bill as well.

The American Energy Innovation Act will help improve our national security in significant ways--again, through mineral security and protecting our electric grid from cyber attacks.

We recognize that these measures play a crucial role in supporting energy innovation and ensuring that its many benefits can be enjoyed by the American people.

There is more that I will take the time to outline at a later point, but I think it is important that, as Members consider what this energy provision allows for, it is pretty expansive. It is pretty expansive, and it is expansive because, again, we haven't seen an energy bill become law in 12 years, so it should be expansive, and it should focus on how we can help facilitate more of the ingenuity and innovation that will come forward from our universities, from our labs, from public- private partnerships, from those who are working every day with great ideas to help, really, transform not only our economy but our environment as well.

So it is more than innovation in the renewable space. It is innovation in the carbon space. It is innovation in the nuclear space. It is innovation when it comes to industrial emissions. It is innovation when it comes to efficiency.

With that innovation comes security, whether it be recognizing that we must do more to ensure that we have stable and secure supply chains through mineral security, through the security that comes with protection of our grids and protection from cyber threats, modernization of our grids, and, again, the security of the good jobs that come with a skilled workforce.

So there is much to talk about in this good measure. Again, I encourage colleagues, we are in an amendment process. Come to us with your comments, your suggestions, your concerns. Let's work them out, but let's get an energy bill through the Senate, through the House, and signed into law by the President.

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