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THE OTHER MANCHIN BILL: Sen. Joe Manchin is marketing his deal with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as a major opportunity to tackle infrastructure permitting challenges that he and fellow lawmakers in both parties recognize as inhibitive to growth in the energy sector.
One of the conditions of the deal was that Congress would tackle comprehensive permitting with separate legislation before the end of the fiscal year, and Manchin, who said in announcing the deal last week that Schumer, President Joe Biden, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi are all on board, said yesterday that “total” permitting reform is in order.
“That’s the thing everyone has told me,” Manchin said on NBC’s Meet the Press, recalling conversations with industry. “When I’ve asked them point blank, they said, ‘“If you can just take the leashes off, take the chains off of us, let us go and do it.’”
Changes would be made to enable project developers to “get these projects completed that are needed now,” he said.
The timelines: Lengthy review and permitting processes, which are required under the National Environmental Policy Act, are fairly widely recognized as onerous to projects of all kinds, from electricity transmission lines to gas pipelines, mines, and wind developments.
NEPA reviews have gotten increasingly longer in length in the decades since the law was passed. One assessment from the Federal Highway Administration found that the average time to complete a NEPA review went from 2.2 years in the 1970s to 4.4 years in the 1980s, rising then to average 6.6 years between 2002 to 2011.
Long reviews for energy projects are characteristic at other agencies, too. Between 2010 and 2017, the average span of time from an agency’s issuance of a notice of intent to its record of decision 3.7 years for the Forest Service, 4.8 years for the Army Corps of Engineers, and 3.3 years for the Department of Energy, according to an analysis from the Trump White House’s Council on Environmental Quality.
The deal itself: It’s unclear yet how the permitting legislation would shape up and exactly what changes it would make, but the Manchin-Schumer deal provides new funding for the Departments of Energy and the Interior, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, specifically for the purpose of speeding up environmental reviews.
Interior would get $150 million; DOE would get $125 million; and FERC would get an additional $100 million in order to purchase equipment, as well as to hire and train more personnel to develop environmental documents and perform environmental analyses. The bill’s language says the funding is meant “to facilitate timely and efficient environmental reviews and authorizations” from the agencies.
What this Congress has already done: Congress passed some permitting reforms in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act last year, which established a goal of completing environmental reviews within two years, as the Trump CEQ did.
The law also requires more coordination between agencies, including the preparation of a single environmental impact statement for a given project unless a lead agency provides justification that multiple documents are more efficient.
Objections: Pushing permitting reform further is sure to get pushback from some lawmakers and green groups, however, who consider it to be compromising environmental standards.
Sen. Jeff Merkley’s initial reaction to the reconciliation deal last week honed in on the permitting condition in particular. He said his worry is that a permitting package, which as discussed by Manchin would liberalize things for fossil fuel projects as well as renewable energy projects, might “turn around and undermine the carbon savings” provided by the green energy provisions in the deal.
Merkley and several of his liberal Senate colleagues just asked the Army Corps of Engineers to put an end to a general permitting for oil and gas projects.
Some environmental groups, who have been largely supportive of the Manchin-Schumer deal despite its language supporting new oil and gas leasing, have voiced objections to the permitting reform condition.
Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen said prospective permitting legislation “could weaken core protections under the National Environmental Policy Act” and pledged to fight policies that would do that.
Earthjustice has been instrumental in filing litigation to disrupt oil and gas lease and infrastructure projects, often prevailing on grounds that agencies violated NEPA’s requirements in moving forward with projects.
Welcome to Daily on Energy, written by Washington Examiner Energy and Environment Writers Jeremy Beaman (@jeremywbeaman) and Breanne Deppisch (@breanne_dep). Email [email protected] or [email protected] for tips, suggestions, calendar items, and anything else. If a friend sent this to you and you’d like to sign up, click here. If signing up doesn’t work, shoot us an email, and we’ll add you to our list.
FIRST GRAIN SHIP LEAVES UKRAINE UNDER BLACK SEA DEAL: The first ship carrying Ukrainian grain exports set sail from the port of Odessa this morning under a deal enabling the safe passage of food-carrying vessels. The ship is carrying some 26,000 metric tons of corn and is heading for Lebanon.
The ship’s departure is the first since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, and comes after Ukrainian and Russian officials signed a U.N.-brokered deal in Turkey last month. The deal is expected to allow for the exports of a large volume of Ukrainian agricultural products to foreign markets and ease a growing food security crisis, the Washington Examiner’s Victor I. Nava reports.
“The first [Ukrainian] grain ship since #RussianAggression has left port,” Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov wrote on Twitter today, thanking Turkey and the U.N. for helping implement the agreement.
MCKINNEY WILDFIRE GROWS TO 52,000 ACRES: The McKinney wildfire in Northern California has burned through more than 52,000 acres in two days, quickly becoming the state’s largest wildfire so far this year and prompting thousands of evacuations.
Authorities said yesterday that the fire, which began Friday in Siskiyou County, is zero percent contained and has merged with the China 2 and Evans fires in the state. In the days since the blaze began, authorities have ordered evacuation of more than 3,000 residents.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Siskiyou County over the weekend, saying in a statement that the fire was “intensified and spread by dry fuels, extreme drought conditions, high temperatures, winds and lightning storms.”
As of yesterday, the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office said, the wildfire had destroyed more than 100 structures in the surrounding area, including homes, a grocery store, and a community center.
DEATH TOLL GROWS FROM KENTUCKY FLOODS: Search-and-rescue operations continued in Kentucky today, days after dozens of people were killed by flash flooding in the state.
In a press conference today, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said the death toll from the floods has climbed to 30 people, with hundreds of others who still remain unaccounted for. The death toll “is going to rise,” he told reporters.
“We just don’t have a firm grasp on that,” the Democrat added of the number of people who remain missing. “I wish we did.”
In an interview yesterday on Meet the Press, Beshear said he believes recovery crews are “going to be finding bodies for weeks, many of them swept hundreds of yards, maybe a quarter-mile plus from where they were last.”
Biden said on Twitter Saturday that he has added individual assistance to the major disaster declaration he declared in the state one day earlier, in an effort to expedite distribution of federal aid.
The floods have displaced thousands of Kentuckians, and left more than 12,000 others without power—sending officials scrambling to respond as they brace for another day of flash floods in Eastern Kentucky.
“The ground is saturated,” Brendon Miller, the district attorney for Breathitt County, said on the county’s emergency management Facebook page last yesterday. “It can’t take much rain. But let’s hope and pray that we get a reprieve and not much further rain that will affect us.”
GAZPROM CUTS GAS SUPPLIES TO LATVIA: Russian state-owned gas giant Gazprom announced this weekend it is cutting deliveries to Latvia over an alleged breach of contract terms.
“Today Gazprom stopped gas supplies to Latvia within the framework of the July order due to the violation of … conditions,” Gazprom said in a Telegram post, without providing further details.
The announcement comes after Gazprom also halted all deliveries to Poland, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Finland, and Denmark earlier this year after the countries refused to pay for their deliveries in rubles. It also comes just days after EU energy ministers reached agreement on a gas rationing plan to help prepare for a feared Russian gas cutoff this winter.
ACC ACTION ENDORSEMENTS: The American Conservation Coalition (ACC Action), a right-leaning conservation group, has announced its congressional endorsements for the 2022 midterm elections. In total, ACC is supporting 25 Republican House and Senate incumbents and challengers “who have worked on effective legislation, championed smart environmental policies and embodied the principle that conservation is conservative.” See the list of candidates here.
FERC AND NERC PUSH FOR FORUM ON RELIABILITY: FERC and NERC are asking the North American Energy Standards Board to convene a forum to talk over solutions to prevailing grid reliability issues, especially the problems posed by interdependency between the natural gas and electric segments, which NERC reiterated in its recent look-back at 2021 was a major problem for operators.
FERC Chairman Richard Glick and NERC head Jim Robb wrote to leadership of the NAESB, which is composed of some 300 corporate members in the energy industry and is devoted to contemplating standards for the wholesale gas and electric sectors, last week to encourage the cross-sector forum in response to extreme weather and ongoing reliability challenges.
“We must ensure that our gas and electricity systems will help keep the lights on in the face of an evolving resource mix and the growing effects of climate change,” Glick said.
Gas-fired outages constituted the majority of outages during Winter Storm Uri last year, NERC found, and the interdependencies between electric and gas segments fed a vicious cycle keeping both offline.
The Rundown
Bloomberg How the EU will allow a slight increase in Russian oil exports
Wall Street Journal Europe’s energy crisis threatens to slow green transition
Reuters After starting New Mexico fire, U.S. asks victims to pay
Calendar
TUESDAY | AUGUST 2
11:00 a.m. The Bipartisan Policy Center will host a forum focused on EPA’s implementation of the roughly $60 billion in infrastructure funding the agency received from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
