Here's a post I made today to Roleigh Martin. He had written a letter to John Koskinen about increasing the capacity of the Strategic Oil Reserves.

Roleigh: As an interesting follow-up to your communications with John Koskinen regarding Petroleum Reserves. H. R. 498 called "The Strategic Reserve Replenishment Act of 1999" directs the Minerals Management Service to accept royalty-in-kind oil from the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of not less than 100,000 barrels of oil per day until the Secretary of Energy certifies to Congress that the Strategic Reserves are at holding capacity. This was proposed 2/2/99. Also, H.R.490 proposed on 2/2/99 would require the Secretary of Energy to, before October 1, 1999, purchase for storage in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and additional $300,000,000 of petroleum products. I'm not positive but I think both of these Bills have passed. I'm going to go back and recheck the status on all the Bills I'm cataloging.

Meg

P.S. The search program at the government site for locating "Legislation" is all screwed up. You search for TVA (for instance) and it gives you lists of numbers with dollar signs in the "key word" category. Definitely acting haywire;very possibly Y2K related. Here's the URL if anyone wants to hunt through legislation by the 106th Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov/home/c106query.html

-- Anonymous, February 06, 1999

Answers

Meg, very useful infomation. Do the house bills specify what the additional oil reserves will be used for? Do they mention reserve power supplies for Y2K or other emergencies?

-- Anonymous, February 08, 1999

What about coal reserves? Federal and State and Local governments, especially in the north, should be taking money out of frivilous parts of their budgets (what special interest group decides that?)and begininng to stockpile massive amounts of coal. It looks unsightly, as it did when I lived in China and work units had huge piles of coal everywhere, but those places were WARM and livable during the freezing temperatures, and the lights were on. Might not this be added to such a bill or made into a new one?

-- Anonymous, February 09, 1999