Washington – Wyoming Congresswoman and House GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) joined “Wake Up Wyoming” earlier today to discuss the latest efforts to support the state’s coal, gas, and oil producers impacted by coronavirus. Click here to listen to her full remarks and see an excerpt of the transcript below:

GLENN WOODS: Let’s switch gears over to coal, gas, and oil which is the backbone of Wyoming industry. In talking with some representatives from those industries, they see themselves as being some of the last, especially in the oil industry, to be able to get up and going again. Coal was already hurting before this, there’s a glut in the oil industry right now, so what’s the path forward from here? 

REP. LIZ CHENEY: Our energy industry, as you guys know, has really suffered, from both the pandemic and also with respect to the oil sector, what we’ve seen in terms of global markets with what the Russians and the Saudis have been doing. I’m on the President’s task force to reopen the economy, and what we’ve been doing is, working to provide suggestions for that task force and talking directly to Secretary of Energy, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Ag, about the kinds of regulatory reform we’d like to see right now. Things like, reduction in royalty fees that are paid to the federal government. We want to see the final rules, not energy, but when you’re talking about mining with respect to trona, we’ve been waiting for a long time now on getting that royalty rate reduced two-percent – we need to see that happen.

I also think this is an opportunity for the federal government to really push on this issue of getting ports open for our coal, for export. We know we’ve been through this process where states on the west coast have shut down their ports to our coal and I think this is an opportunity to really push to get that to happen. Basically, looking for ways that we can suspend some of the requirements for our producers in terms of when they’re operating on public land, what they’re required to do. We’d like to make sure from a regulatory perspective, that government is doing everything possible to help to loosen that, to lessen that burden. We’d like to see additional resources dedicated to making purchases into the [Strategic Petroleum Reserve].

On uranium, there actually was a really, I think, excellent report that the Administration issued I want to say about ten days ago. Their nuclear energy working group issued a report about how important domestic uranium production is for the nation and how important it is that we make sure that we do everything we can to help incentivize, help ensure that we can maintain domestic uranium production. I saw a uranium expert describing this report as ‘the most important report issued on this topic by any president since Eisenhower.’ We also would like to see a domestic uranium reserve and see funds appropriated to be able to do that as well.