Joe Barton Oil Quotations

Releasing an equivalent amount of oil from the reserve for a short period of time will help keep fuel supplies adequate, not just for the Gulf Coast area, but for all the United States.

Our country needs more oil refineries because the people who work for a living need gasoline to get to work. These are the people who earn paychecks and buy groceries and pay their bills, including their taxes. That means they use gasoline every day. They need it, and they need it at a price they can afford to pay.

We have between 1 to 2 million barrels of day of oil production in the Gulf of Mexico that's been shut down because of the hurricane, ... I think a very good case can be made today that some retailers have taken advantage of that and have begun to gouge the American people.

We use 21 million barrels of oil a day, and only have the refining capacity for 16 million on a good day, ... And after Katrina and Rita, we haven't had many good days.

I'm a free-market guy. I come from an oil state. I am not anti-oil, by any stretch. But I don't want to see people get ripped off just because they're scared and retailers think they can just jack up the price.

If there is a silver lining in this tragic situation, it may be that our country understands how fragile our energy sector is. ... We can't just get our oil and gas from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Gulf of Mexico. We need to diversify our domestic oil resources.

We cannot stop hurricanes, but we can mitigate some of these adverse impacts on our energy infrastructure and our economy that hurricanes can have. We need to tackle this problem for one simple reason: Our country needs more oil refineries because the people who work for a living need gasoline to get to work.