This op-ed by Rachael Hamby appeared on Center for Western Priorities on July 24,2024.
Earlier this week, U.S. Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming and Joe Manchin of West Virginia introduced the Energy Permitting Reform Act, a long-awaited bill to streamline permitting of both renewable energy and fossil fuel projects. The bill includes important and needed provisions that would help accelerate renewable energy development, such as facilitating planning and permitting for transmission lines to bring renewable energy from where it is captured to where it is needed.
However, the Energy Permitting Reform Act is primarily a Trojan horse for a number of problematic and damaging industry wish-list items that would roll back recently-enacted reforms to the oil and gas leasing program and limit the Bureau of Land Management’s ability to fulfill its mandate to manage our public lands for multiple uses. The bill props up the continued development of fossil fuels at a moment when the nation should be doing everything it can to transition to clean energy.
Renewable rights-of-way would be weighed down by requirement to offer acres nominated by industry
The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law in August 2022, made renewable energy rights-of-way contingent on the BLM offering two million acres or 50 percent of acres nominated for lease, whichever is smaller, for sale within the year prior to authorization of the renewable right-of-way. To meet this requirement in a way that also meets the BLM’s obligation to manage lands for multiple uses, the BLM has offered a combination of industry-nominated acres and BLM-nominated acres. The Energy Permitting Reform Act would change this so that the formula is calculated based only on acres nominated by industry; acres nominated by the BLM would not count towards the requirement. This flawed provision from the Inflation Reduction Act, which would be exacerbated by the clarifications in the Energy Permitting Reform Act, forces the BLM to rush environmental reviews, Tribal consultation, and community and stakeholder outreach.
Lease conditions would be tied to outdated management plans
The Energy Permitting Reform Act also proposes to limit the BLM’s ability to include conditions or stipulations on individual leases if those conditions and stipulations are not already authorized by the Resource Management Plan for the area. While RMPs are supposed to be updated every five to seven years, many RMPs are updated less frequently, and some are upwards of 30 years old, due to chronic under-funding of the BLM by Congress. An outdated RMP will not reflect the most recent information available on scientific, cultural, Tribal, environmental, and recreational resources and values present in the area, forcing all parties to act based on information that is outdated, and potentially no longer accurate.
Drilling permit terms would be lengthened, allowing industry to sit on permits even longer
Currently, a drilling permit is good for three years; the Energy Permitting Reform Act extends this to four years. With oil and gas companies already hoarding nearly 7,400 drilling permits that they aren’t using, extending the amount of time they can sit on these permits is not only unnecessary, it would make an existing problem worse.
Many parcels would be exempt from environmental laws and bonding and mitigation requirements
Across the West, it is common for one party to own the land surface and another party to own the minerals below the surface, a situation referred to as split estate. Under the Energy Permitting Reform Act, for a parcel where the surface is not federally owned and less than 50 percent of the subsurface minerals are federally owned, that parcel would be exempt from the federal drilling permit process, and therefore would not require environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. For these parcels, it would be left to the state to issue its own drilling permits.
Pause on liquified natural gas exports would be lifted and reviews fast-tracked
The Energy Permitting Reform Act would mandate an end to the pause on liquid natural gas exports put in place by the Biden administration in January 2024, and would give the Secretary of Energy 90 days to either approve or deny any future export applications once environmental reviews are complete. In addition to setting a one-size-fits-all arbitrary review deadline, this provision forces the U.S. to continue contributing to climate change through the production and export of natural gas, when what is needed is leadership from the U.S. and other wealthy nations in the transition to renewable, non-fossil energy sources.
Mining companies would get to claim unlimited public lands to dump mine waste
In a massive giveaway of public lands to mining companies that attempts to get around the recent Rosemont decision, the Energy Permitting Reform Act includes a provision clarifying that mining companies can claim as many mill sites — lands where they can dump mine waste and build other mining infrastructure — as they feel they need, whether the mill site is on mineral or non-mineral land, as long as the mill site is included in a mining Plan of Operations. The bill will also have the effect of eliminating the requirement that mining companies prove that their claims are valid. With these changes, mining companies could secure unlimited public lands for waste dumping. Allowing unlimited mill sites on any type of land would enable mining companies to claim hundreds or thousands of acres of public lands to dump mine waste, preventing other uses of the land while damaging and polluting landscapes and waters.
Better alternatives are out there
In short, the Energy Permitting Reform Act is an oil and gas reform rollback bill trying to masquerade as a renewable energy permitting bill.
What the country really needs is policies that facilitate thoughtful up-front planning for renewable energy siting and development. Some needed policies have recently been put in place: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission recently updated its transmission planning requirements, and the Bureau of Land Management is finalizing an update to the Western Solar Plan. Additional bills, such as the Clean Energy and Transmission Acceleration Act, the SPEED and Reliability Act and the BIG WIRES Act, have already been introduced to bolster these existing policies by requiring more regional transmission planning and addressing concerns around how the cost of power lines should be divided up among states that will host the lines or use the power they carry, among other needed policy updates. Some of these policies are included in the Energy Permitting Reform Act, but there’s no reason they need to be paired with pro-fossil fuel measures. These bills can and should move forward on their own as actual renewable energy permitting bills that incentivize and accelerate the urgently-needed transition away from fossil fuels and towards the clean energy economy of the future.