President Trump is expected to sign an executive order Tuesday afternoon that the oil and gas industry sees as essential to speeding up pipeline reviews and permitting, in addition to other energy infrastructure projects, according to senior representatives of the oil and gas industry and unions.
“We also look forward to President Trump as he signs an executive order aimed at streamlining the permitting process for infrastructure projects,” said Jack Gerard, the president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute. “There is over a trillion dollars that is expected to be invested just in building energy infrastructure that’s separate and apart from building highways, bridges, etc.”
Gerard previewed the president’s action while discussing a new report that showed the enormous benefit from pipeline development to jobs creation and the economy.
Moving “permits in a timely fashion” will only increase the benefits of opening up private investment in the nation’s pipeline infrastructure, he said. Gerard said the oil and natural gas industry employs close to 10.3 million Americans in the U.S., and “it’s critical that we have this infrastructure … and pipelines are essential.”
The oil and gas industry ships 99.9 percent of all its raw and refined products through pipelines, Gerard said.
“We applaud [the president’s] efforts and the efforts on the part of the administration to create jobs and help continue the renaissance” in energy, Gerard told reporters.
Part of the permitting process for projects includes environmental impact reviews that are required under the National Environmental Policy Act. The law requires that all infrastructure projects be reviewed for their impacts on local ecology and the environment. But a lot of time those reviews can be bogged down by a process that requires input from a number of agencies.
The president’s order comes after the administration has had several months to review the permitting process and find ways of expediting it, said Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, who chairs the oil and gas labor management committee.
“I think they will come out with a good product under this executive order that will protect the environment” while still providing for jobs and the economy, he said. McGarvey said he expects the president’s order to better coordinate agencies to ensure the permitting process is not “death of a thousand paper cuts,” where projects are scuttled because the bureaucracy is too sprawling and complex.
Gerard said he believes the president’s goal is to achieve permits taking no longer than two years. He said the oil industry has faced circumstances when it is waiting for permits for nearly a decade with no way of knowing when they will be approved. “And it makes no sense at all,” he added.
Meanwhile, the president of the New Jersey chapter of the environmental group Sierra Club expects the order to also roll back an Obama administration executive order that “required strict building standards for government-funded projects to reduce exposure to increased flooding from sea level rise” due to climate change.
“Obama originally signed this executive order to help protect people and property from climate change and sea level rise,” said Jeff Tittel, the director of the New Jersey chapter. “The strict standards in the EO were meant to protect against climate change.
“Getting rid of these standards will put vital infrastructure and buildings at risk. All the taxpayer money could wash out to sea in the next storm. Flooding and inundation are only going to become more dangerous and common, especially in our coastal communities.”
The Obama order was put in place in response to Hurricane Sandy that pummeled the East Coast in 2012.
