The House Natural Resources and Energy and Commerce committees this week will explore opportunities for domestic energy production and address concerns with rising gasoline prices.

The two Resources hearings -- Wednesday's will focus on Gulf of Mexico permitting and Thursday's will explore domestic energy reserves -- are expected to highlight Republican concerns that the Obama administration is blocking access to public minerals and the jobs that they support while hyping statistics that indicate domestic energy production is up.

A third hearing Thursday before E&C's Energy and Power Subcommittee will focus on oil supplies, gasoline prices and jobs in the Gulf. The panel's chairman, Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), last week said U.S. EPA plans to regulate greenhouse gases would lead to higher prices at the gas pump, a charge Democratic members of the House, including those who favor curbing EPA powers, dismissed (E&ENews PM, March 11).

Each of the hearings will shed particular focus on White House policies Republicans warn will prolong dependence on foreign fuels and raise the cost of American energy.

"It should be a goal to become less dependent on worldwide energy fluctuation," said Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) in a segment last week on C-SPAN's Washington Journal. "We can do that because we have a tremendous amount of reserves here in the continental United States."

But the Obama administration has shut the door on domestic energy production by canceling leases in the Rocky Mountain West, "slow-walking" drilling permits in the Gulf and imposing burdensome regulations that have stifled developments of oil, gas, coal and unconventional energy sources, Hastings said.

"We have a tremendous amount of resources here in our country, frankly, that we aren't utilizing," he said.

Republican lawmakers last week highlighted updated estimates from the Congressional Research Service that indicate the United States' recoverable resources of oil, natural gas and coal are larger than those of Saudi Arabia, China and Canada combined.

The November 2010 report indicated that the United States contains 19.1 billion barrels of proven reserves of oil and 244.7 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves of natural gas. Undiscovered but technically recoverable oil in the United States is estimated at 145.5 billion barrels, with 1,162.7 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered but technically recoverable natural gas, according to the report.

The United States also contains an estimated 488 billion tons of coal, more than half of which is technically recoverable, CRS found.

The report will likely be a "new staple talking point" among Republican lawmakers, said a Senate GOP aide. An expert from CRS is scheduled to testify at Hastings' Thursday hearing, said committee spokesman Spencer Pederson.

Western Republican members of the Resources Committee are likely to also target Obama administration policies such as the Bureau of Land Management's "wild lands" policy, which would offer protections of roadless lands but also prevent the sale of some new oil and gas leases.

Hastings last week made specific reference to the administration's decision in early 2009 to halt 77 oil and gas leases sold in Utah in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said fell too close to national parks and other sensitive lands and lacked coordination with other Interior agencies.

Other Republican members of the panel say BLM is moving too slowly issuing leases that have come under protest from environmental groups in the West.

Hastings said he sees a long-term energy fix in the estimated 800 billion to 1.4 trillion barrels of potentially recoverable oil from shale reserves in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah.

"You can see that those reserves are plentiful. And that's only in the Intermountain West," Hastings said. "It seems to me that the best antidote, long term, for these fluctuations in gas prices, is for us to utilize the resources that we have in this country."

Democratic, administration stance

Democratic leaders on the committee have balked at Republican claims that industry needs more access to public lands to boost production and satisfy more domestic demand.

Late Friday, Senate Democrats released a statement that U.S. oil production, including that on federal lands and waters, has been increasing since 2008, with its largest single-year increase in decades in 2009.

"The industry needs to ease the consumers," said Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the ranking member on Resource's public lands subcommittee. Grijalva cited BLM statistics that oil and gas companies have leased more than 40 million public acres but are producing on 11 million of them.

"Before we say there needs to be a rush to open up more, I think the investigation has to be why that two-thirds is not being utilized" he said. "I say it is speculative. I say they are holding onto land so somebody else can't get to it."

BLM Director Bob Abbey last week reiterated the administration's position that there is not enough mineral resource under Interior management to make a dent in global oil prices.

"We could take steps now to lease new lands, but it would be years before those lands could ever be developed," Abbey said following a budget hearing before Hastings' committee. "In the meantime, we understand the role that we play. But our actions have very little role on the worldwide price of oil."

Gulf drilling, permitting

Wednesday's Resources hearing will explore development of the nation's 1.8-billion-acre outer continental shelf, with a particular focus on the Obama administration's oversight of drilling nearly a year after BP PLC spilled nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf.

Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement late last month issued the first deepwater drilling permit since the spill and late Friday issued a second permit for a well that was suspended under a now lifted moratorium.

Salazar has promised to issue a "handful" more permits in the near future now that operators have begun demonstrating the ability to prevent and contain possible oil spills.

Permitting will be the dominant theme of the hearing, but equal attention should be given to the amount of federal waters the Obama administration has made available to drilling, said Dan Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research.

"When the president says we only have 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, he's right," Kish said. "But that's only our proven reserves."

While BOEMRE has leased some 40 million acres for offshore drilling, federal waters include about 1.76 billion acres altogether, Kish said. The administration said it will not consider drilling in the Atlantic, Pacific and some parts of the eastern Gulf of Mexico in its next five-year plan but will consider holding additional leases off the coast of Alaska.

Schedule: The first Resources hearing is Wednesday, March 16, at 10 a.m. in 1324 Longworth.

Witnesses: Scott Angelle, secretary, Louisiana Department of Natural Resources; Elizabeth Ames Jones, chairman, Railroad Commission of Texas; Charlotte A. Randolph, president, Lafourche Parish Government, Louisiana; Chett Chiasson, executive director, Greater Lafourche Port Commission, Louisiana; Samuel Giberga, general counsel, Hornbeck Offshore Services; Christopher K. Jones, Keogh, Cox & Wilson, Ltd.; Keith Overton, chairman, Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association.

Schedule: The second Resources hearing is Thursday, March 17, at 10 a.m. in 1324 Longworth.

Witnesses: Expert from Congressional Research Service; others TBA.

Schedule: The Energy and Power Subcommittee hearing is Thursday, March 17, at 9 a.m. in 2123 Rayburn.

Witnesses: TBA.