Ed Markey — Markey: Oil Exports All About Pumping Up Profits for Big Oil

So, thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me to be here with you today on this very, very very important subject. I'm kind of new to this issue. Um It's my 39th year on one of the energy related committees. And so, I go back to the beginning of time, back to the actual restrictions on the exportation of uh oil being exported out of our country. So, let me just go down the list and we'll just go through a few things.

Number one, it'll be bad for consumers in America. Barclays has done a study which indicates that last year um because we had the ban that consumers saved $11 billion. Uh this year, their study says the consumers are going to save dollars. Now, that's big because obviously keeping that supply pressure on here uh actually helps to keep the price lower here. Remember, the domestic price is set in Oklahoma or Cushing, Oklahoma.

The international price is the price that the oil industry wants to get. That's always $3 to $6 a barrel higher. That's what they're trying to do. Get it on a ship, get it on the international market, get that higher price internationally. So, we keep it here, the pressure is strong to keep the price uh low. Uh national security. We are still importing 5 million barrels of oil a day. You hear that? We're importing. It's not energy independence.

We're nowhere near it at 5 million barrels of oil a day that we are still importing. We're competing with China for the title of largest importer. But our numbers look very similar to what they looked like back in 1975. So, this is kind of a premature declaration of energy independence when you're still importing that staggering amount of oil per day. Oil isn't like any other commodity. It's not like exporting a watch, exporting widgets, exporting uh semiconductors.

We don't send hundreds of thousands of young men and women overseas in order to protect the importation of watches or semiconductors. That's what we do for oil. And from my perspective, as long as we are exporting young men and women over to the Middle East in uniform in order to protect the importation of oil, then we should not be exporting the oil which we have here in the United States. Exports also harm the domestic refining industry.

We're seeing a boom in domestic refining capacity. We're seeing a dramatic increase uh in that production all across our own country and if in fact we start to export that oil, we're going to see a dramatic closing of refining capacity here in the United States. That is something that we should not allow to happen. We're also seeing a dramatic boom in the shipbuilding industry in our country. A 40% increase in shipbuilding.

The largest increase in shipbuilding in over 20 years. And why is that? Well, under the Jones Act, when you are transporting oil within the country, you have to use US flagged ships. So, we're seeing a huge boom in shipbuilding and refining capacity inside of our own country right now. Now, why does the oil industry want to do this? Well, huge profits. You get it out on the open market, you get that global price, then you just head in right to the bank.

I understand that. That makes a lot of sense from the perspective of the oil industry. You hear people say, "Well, it's going to going to help us in our geopolitical endeavors. It'll help us to help our allies around the world." Well, understand our oil companies are not state owned. We're not Russia. We're not Saudi Arabia. We're not Venezuela. Our government doesn't tell these ships where to go. Our fiduciary relationship between the shareholders and oil companies instruct them to send the oil towards the highest price.

That's capitalism. That's our system. The hand on the tiller is Rex Tillerson. It is not the president of the United States. That's not our system. The price that's going to be paid that is the highest is going to be the Chinese. It's going to be other Asian countries. That's where the oil's going. And we should not kid ourselves that anything other than that is going to happen. They They are going to be thirsting for this additional resource as the years go by.

And then you come down to the little issue of the environment. If the United States is going to take all of these risks in the drilling for oil, then our consumers at the least should be the beneficiaries of it. Cuz we haven't solved the problems of methane coming out of fracked wells. We haven't solved all of the other related environmental issues that relate to um the new technologies that are being used. We can solve them.

I think we have to make a commitment to solving them. But we have not solved them. And so, on that final issue, on the environmental issue, we have to make sure that those risks that are being taken result in our country, our consumers, our industries getting the benefit of that lower priced oil. So, this is a big debate. It's a big issue. But understand that we're still pretty much where we were in 1975 in terms of the amount of oil that we're importing.

We're still importing about a million and a half barrels a day from the Persian Gulf, believe it or not, even today. That is not healthy for us in terms of the magnitude of the issues that we are going to be confronted with on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis as we look at the big stories leading the news every single night coming out of the Middle East. We don't know what's going to happen in the Middle East.

We should be humble, very humble. We've made so many mistakes in the Middle East that it's time for a little bit of humility, especially when we're talking about this most precious resource, oil, which runs right through as a theme through most of the issues that we're dealing with today of paramount national importance. So, I thank you all for inviting me and I'm looking forward to the conversation. Thank you. [Applause]