WASHINGTON - House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, was a key player in ensuring that as much as $2 billion in funding for research into ultradeep-water oil and natural gas exploration was part of the recently approved House energy legislation.
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If that measure is approved by the Senate, some of those funds could end up back in DeLay's district, where a Sugar Land-based energy consortium has been vying to run the program.
With DeLay's support, the Texas Energy Center has been lobbying for years to oversee the project, which involves research into finding and producing oil in the deepest waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The legislation also provides funds for exploring hard-to-produce onshore energy resources deep below the ground.
The funding proposal has been criticized by public interest groups as an unnecessary subsidy for an industry earning record profits and as pork-barrel spending pushed by influential lawmakers.
Even President Bush has questioned whether the industry needed the government help, saying "with oil at more than $50 a barrel ... energy companies do not need taxpayers-funded incentives to explore for oil and gas."
Keith Ashdown, vice president of policy for the Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group, said: "There is a parochial nature to every bill that comes out of Capitol Hill. But this is, in our mind, a Mack truck of waste."
Ashdown said DeLay's involvement will raise suspicions that the Sugar Land research consortium has an inside track for the contract.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/3165006