Congressman Bruce Westerman Visits Prescott and Talks About the “One Big Beautiful Bill”

4th District Congressman Bruce Westerman was recently in Prescott and sat down to talk with the Hope-Prescott News.  He noted he was for the recent “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed by Congress and even wrote some of it.  Said Westerman, “the part where we talk about energy dominance that predominantly came through the Natural Resources Committee which I chair.”  He said they had been working on it for over a year before we ever knew they would have a chance to present the bill. “Producing American energy is something that’s very important to our energy security and our national security”, said Westerman.  He noted they paved the way to unleash a lot of that energy.  This includes offshore production in the Gulf of America which falls under his committee’s jurisdiction as well as the onshore production on federal lands.  “When you get out in the Permian Basin and you get out in New Mexico, one of the richest oil and gas deposits anywhere, as well as …North Dakota,” said the congressman.  He noted one of the areas where the U.S. has a lot of energy and minerals is in Alaska.  Said Westerman, “we were able to open that up in the Big Beautiful Bill”.  He noted a lot of people don’t realize the U.S. has been producing oil on the north slopes of Alaska since the 1970’s.  Congressman Westerman said, “if you know about drilling an oil well, it’s not just oil that comes out of the well, it’s oil and water and natural gas.”  He notes you have to process that and separate those three things.  Westerman said oil has been sent through a pipeline for several decades, but all that natural gas has been pumped back into the ground…so as a result we have about 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that could be sold on the global market if we had a pipeline.  He notes, “we’ve opened it up where they can build a pipeline from the north slope down to Anchorage and then build an LNG facility out on the Kenai Peninsula…and that opens up all that gas to go to the Pacific Rim”.  Westerman said he had made a trip to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.  They all want to buy the gas along with other countries in that area.  He also noted they want to buy gas, invest in the pipeline, the LNG export facility, and the ships to carry it.  “Every time that gas passes by a meter, that’s revenue coming back to the federal government.”

On our next article, we’ll visit with Congressman Westerman about some companies he visited on that trip that are interested in the lithium deposits in south Arkansas.