Unlocking Our Domestic Lng Potential Act of 2025
Floor Speech
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Mr. CASTEN. Mr. Speaker, my colleague just said that to vote against this bill means you haven't studied the energy industry.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today as someone who spent 20 years working in the energy industry. I rise today as the son of someone who spent his entire career in the energy industry. I will take my fancy book learning or school of hard knocks learning against any of you all any day.
What strikes me in listening to this debate is, it reminds me of a paperweight my dad had on his desk when I was a kid. It was a little paperweight of an oil barrel. On one side of the barrel, it said: ``Relax. The price will go down,'' if you flipped it over, it said, ``Relax. The price will go up,'' because energy consumers want the price to be cheap. Energy producers want the price to be high.
If you work in the energy industry as long as I have or even if you worked there for 35 seconds, you spend time talking to consumers and producers. The debate that is going on here in this body is not what is in consumers' interest, what is in producers' interest, but what is in the national interest.
The Republicans across the aisle are making a very articulate case for energy producers. It is not lost on us that most of them represent districts that are heavily dominated by producers.
Over here, there is a very articulate case on behalf of consumers because most of Americans--I would hazard a guess that all Americans are consumers.
Because when we export natural gas from the United States, we reduce domestic supply, which pushes up the price. That is why the Natural Gas Act since 1935, among other things, has required that gas export facilities can't be built unless they are in the national interest, not producers' interest, not the drillers' interest, not some random Chinese fertilizer manufacturers' interest, but the national interest. They go on to talk about facts. If you want to talk about people who studied this, let's talk about the Department of Energy.
There is an LNG export terminal, I am sure you are aware of it, in Freeport, Texas. In June 2022, it was shut down because of a fire for about a month. That gave us real-time experiments on exactly what happens when you make a marginal shift in the export of LNG from the United States.
According to the Department of Energy website, this is what happened: ``The U.S. natural gas spot price fell by 13 percent on June 9. The price continued to decline by an additional 17 percent through the end of June. Prices fell largely because the outage at Freeport decreased U.S. natural gas exports, putting downward pressure on natural gas prices.''
That is 30 percent inflation in just one month from just one facility. Supply and demand is real. This is not complicated.
Mr. Speaker, understand what this bill is trying to do. By stipulating that all exports are in the national interest, you are stipulating that raising every American's monthly heating bill is in the national interest.
This week, Donald Trump gave a speech where he said: ``We are looking at affordability--we are going to bring it down for everybody. . . .'' I think he meant we are going to make things more affordable, but you understand the point.
If the Republicans all care about affordability, if they care about the national interest, if they just care about proving Donald Trump right for once, if they just care about doing what he tells them to do, vote ``no'' on this bill.
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