Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011

Floor Speech

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Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the gentlewoman's amendment, although I had an amendment that was to follow this amendment which sought to grab $47 million from the ARPA-E program to fund a jobs program to restore the clean coal research dollars that are stricken in this continuing resolution.

My amendment would have restored funding to the DOE's Fossil Energy Research and Development program to maintain our commitment to domestic coal and natural gas, which powers our Nation. It protects our environment and enhances our energy independence.

Certainly, in being from the State of West Virginia, this is a jobs issue for us. Our coal industry is under serious attack in this administration, both from the regulatory perspective and from other environmental areas. We realize that 50 percent of the Nation's energy is powered by coal. In order to use that most abundant resource that we have in our Nation, we need to find ways to burn it cleaner and mine it more efficiently.

For more than a quarter of a century, Fossil Energy Research has converted taxpayer investment into high-tech advances that in some ways touch every single American's life. Fossil Energy is finding and testing new ways to use coal more cleanly and efficiently by producing energy from coal gasification and by improving technologies to clean, capture, or store the emissions from coal-fired power plants. Over 1,000 American pioneers are doing research in this area, many of them located in our State of West Virginia at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, West Virginia.

The Morgantown facility is the only national laboratory devoted to fossil energy research. So while I'm unable to offer my amendment to strike $47 million from the ARPA-E program and restore the $30.6 million into the clean coal research program, I did want to take this opportunity to emphasize the feeling that I have of how important it is for us to move forward in a bold and technologically superior way to find a way to use our most abundant resource.

The advanced research projects happening at Fossil Energy now will help keep clean, affordable energy from our traditional few resources as an integral part of our energy supply while we innovate and research our way to those new energy resources.

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