After Manchin failure in senate is permitting reform dead?
leaders have both endorsed permitting reform bills. And while far apart on some details, plenty of common ground remains on the need to speed up a process that can take 10 years to complete - and that's before construction can even begin.
"It's a political compromise that needs to happen," said Christopher Guith, senior vice president of policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Global Energy Institute." brought permitting reform into the forefront. Every member of Congress has had to look at it and realize this is an issue."For Republicans, natural gas companies need more interstate pipelines built to get their product from fields in Texas and Pennsylvania. And for Democrats, clean energy developers need long distance transmission lines that can bring electricity from where the wind blows and sun shines to where it does not --Both are held up by a combination of lengthy environmental reviews and litigation by environmental groups. And in the case of transmission lines, the system also allows individual states to block projects and makes it difficult to obtain the necessary agreement from utilities to secure financing, said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a Maryland based consulting firm for clean energy companies. "The electric industry grew up with thousands of individual utilities serving local customers with local generation," he said."Now we're trying to move electricity across many states, and we don't have that regulatory structure to do it."But it did not go as far as She wanted to rewrite the more than 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act -- a non-starter for many Democrats.In a memo circulated earlier this week, GOP leaders criticized the bill's two year deadline for environmental reviews as unenforceable. Andin sighting transmission lines and handed more power to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. "Capito's bill was the starting point for Republicans to lay down their position," said Frank Maisano, an energy consultant at the law firm Bracewell."Now we're at the point where we're actually going to talk about it." Lobbyists are hoping Congress will address permitting reform in their end-of-year spending bill -- a process that has long been an avenue for political horse trading. The thinking is that if Republicans and Democrats can't come to terms on the issue itself, perhaps one side can offer the other something else to win their support -- asBut with midterm elections just six weeks away -- and Republicans expected to win the House and possibly the Senate -- the political dynamics of Washington stand to change substantially in the months ahead."I don't know,"Gramlich said."Something has to give here eventually."
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