Introduction Of The Use It Act

Floor Speech

* Mr. MARKEY of Massachusetts. Madam Speaker, recently, President Obama announced a 5-year offshore drilling plan that would allow oil and gas exploration in new areas off the East Coast and in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. However, before oil companies drill off thousands of miles of pristine coastline, they should first use the thousands of drilling leases they already own.

* Right now, oil companies hold the offshore drilling rights to an area the size of Pennsylvania on which they are not actually drilling. In fact, of 7,316 total offshore leases held by oil companies right now, only 1,844 are producing, according to the Interior Department. Production is occurring on only 8,894,428 acres on the Outer Continental Shelf out of 39,331,641 total acres leased to oil companies. That means that oil companies are producing on only about one-quarter of the leases and roughly 22 percent of the acreage that they hold offshore.

* As a result, today I am introducing legislation that would provide an incentive to oil companies to move quickly to get oil to the market or relinquish the leases so that they could be developed by other companies. My legislation, the United States Exploration on Idle Tracts Act or the USE IT Act, would establish an escalating fee over time on nonproducing leases to encourage companies to expedite production. Similar legislation repeatedly passed the House in the last Congress with large, bipartisan majorities.

* President Obama has also included this concept in his budget request for fiscal year 2011. The Department of Interior estimates that the proposed fee would raise $760 million over the next ten years--allowing us to drill for oil while also drilling for deficit dollars on behalf of U.S. taxpayers.

* As gas prices once again move towards $3 per gallon, it is time to finally get oil companies to ``use it or lose it'' on their nonproducing leases.

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