Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Pa., told Newsmax on Thursday that "just two short years ago we were energy independent" under the Trump administration, but "since Joe Biden came into office, all of that has changed."
"We've done everything possible to rattle our domestic energy industry ... prohibiting the expansion [of fracking] on federal lands, canceling the Keystone [XL] pipeline ... and our banking systems are being regularly threatened, frankly, for investments in fossil fuel companies," Meuser said.
The Pennsylvania congressman added on "American Agenda" that while an extension of the Keystone pipeline was shut down within the U.S., the State Department has removed all sanctions on constructing an expansion to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in Central Europe.
"Meanwhile, of course, the famous approval of the Nord Stream 2," Meuser stated. "So somehow or another pipelines are OK from Russia to Germany, but not so from Canada to the United States of America."
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average price for retail gasoline increased by more than $1 per gallon between the start and the end of 2021. Additionally, the average crude oil price for 2021 was the highest since 2018.
"All of this just builds up to create no investment, certainly not capital investment taking place in the energy industry, and a shortage of supplies," the congressman said.
Meuser also said that an invasion of Ukraine by Russia could impact the price of energy in New England. He suggested that an infrastructure project connecting the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania to the Northeast could alleviate foreign reliance.
The Marcellus Shale natural gas reservoirs is underneath about 90,000 square miles of Pennsylvania, New York, and West Virginia. It goes down to about 9,000 feet and sources say it hold hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.
"We get imports from Russia into New England because we don't have a pipeline that goes across New York State from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, the second largest reserve in the world, to New England," he said. "So, we're doing a lot of things kind of backwards, and we need to straighten that out."
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