I see three things in this that one would reasonably expect to find in the bill based on his statement (I assume he read the statement):

1. Support for energy exploration off our coasts (this is commonly understood to mean oil and natural gas drilling)
2. Support for more Nuclear generation facilities
3. Support for a Trans-Canadian natural gas pipeline

To my surprise, a review of the bills table of contents could not pinpoint any section supporting oil or gas exploration off our coasts. So I tried searching the document. Searches for the following:

* drill
* drilling
* exploration
* offshore
* coast

I found no references at all to the first four, and all references to coast were about coastal environmental management in the face of sea-level rise.

There is also no section that I could find supporting natural gas pipelines, Canadian or not.

Support for nuclear power was confusing at best:

Subtitle I—Nuclear and Advanced Technologies
SEC. 181. REVISIONS TO LOAN GUARANTEE PROGRAM AUTHORITY.
(a) DEFINITION OF CONDITIONAL COMMITMENT.—
Section 1701 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (42 U.S.C. 16511), as amended by section 130(a) of this Act, is amended by adding after paragraph (7) the following:

The problem with this is that Section 130(a) does not in fact amend Section 1701 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Section 129 does. I spent about an hour looking through the bill trying to find things that I thought were important to Kirk, and I noticed this discrepancy. This makes me wonder if anyone actually read this bill.

Additionally, the the text of the amendment for Section 1701:

‘‘(8) CONDITIONAL COMMITMENT.—The term ‘conditional commitment’ means a final term sheet negotiated between the Secretary and a project sponsor or sponsors, which term sheet shall be binding on both parties and become a final loan guarantee agreement if all conditions precedent established in the term sheet, which shall include the acquisition of all necessary permits and licenses, are satisfied.’’.

Anyone following the issues with increasing nuclear generation capacity in America knows that acquiring all the permits and licenses, due to lawsuits by environmental groups, is the hard part. Before any real progress can be made on nuclear energy here, the process of obtaining permits must be streamlined and protected from specious lawsuits.

In sum, I don’t see how any of Kirk’s stated priorities for energy are furthered by this bill, and therefore do not know why he supported it, unless he thought if would be good for his re-election or election to another office.