MANCHIN RALLIES SENATORS AROUND BIPARTISAN PERMITTING REFORM BILL
Hearing
"As the Chairman of this Committee, I'm committed to continuing to convene my colleagues for open dialogue and negotiations. At this point we have the legislation I filed that received bipartisan support, the House and Senate Republican proposals, and Senator Carper's forthcoming proposal on the table. Now, just as we did with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, we all need to sit down and negotiate in good faith--putting politics aside--to craft the Bipartisan Permitting Reform Bill.
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I would like for all of you and everyone in the room here, if you will when you leave this room, support bipartisan permitting reform. Not my bill, not Senator Barrasso's bill, not Senator Capito's bill, not Senator Carper's bill, whoever is putting bills up -- we need a little bit of all four of them to make this work. We can get together much quicker if we're all in this, and I think we are. We want this done and everybody wants it done.
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It's the agencies under our jurisdiction doing most of the permitting for these projects. Over 80% of NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) for energy and minerals projects are completed by agencies under this committee's jurisdiction--and that's almost half of the EISs done across the entire federal government. They take 4.5 years on average, and often several years beyond that. Members of this Committee have a wide range of views regarding what the future of American energy should look like, but no matter what you want to build, it takes too long.
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This is why the bill I introduced, and 47 bipartisan Senators voted for last year, would set enforceable timelines for agencies to complete reviews, limit the length of these reviews, and require agencies to coordinate on one government-wide, simultaneous review instead of multiple uncoordinated reviews. It would accelerate the court process for energy projects by requiring courts to set these cases for expedited review and shortening deadlines to bring lawsuits from 6 years to less than 6 months. This will provide certainty that if agencies approve a project, it won't then get delayed by endless litigation.
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The Mountain Valley Pipeline has been undergoing permitting and litigation for more than 8 years--that includes 8 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews and 9 court cases in the Fourth Circuit. And siting, permitting, litigation, and decision-making on how to pay for long-distance, high voltage transmission lines tie up these projects for over a decade, if they ever get built. These challenges threaten the reliability of our grid. Some reforms will help all sectors -- such as setting and enforcing deadlines, expediting litigation, and more. Some will require sector-specific fixes. But no energy sector is immune to permitting roadblocks. Despite every administration and Congress in recent memory--and every sector of the energy industry--identifying permitting reform as a vital need, the problem is getting worse, not better.
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The whole purpose of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is energy security. This Administration has been unable to use the word energy security, all they use is climate, and I have corrected them, and I will continue to correct them. It is energy security. We can invest in the technology of the future that we're all going to need and mature that, but we're not going to eliminate something before we have something to replace it with. And if you think we're doing something wrong by having fossil and clean technology, go look at Europe, look at what happened. We're not going to repeat that mistake.
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Have you all seen an uptick, in the last year or two since we've passed pieces of monumental legislation -- the bipartisan infrastructure law, the IRA --have you seen more investments, more activity, more desire to do more in America than ever before or have you not?
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If the EPA does not give us permits for Class VI wells, which they have not, that means they're trying to strangle you by a thousand cuts. They're trying to go one way without the other. They know it's a balanced approach. So don't tell me you're going to invest in carbon capture sequestration when we can't get a permit to sequester the carbon we capture. These are the games that are being played. I know it, they know I know it, and we're not going to let them get away with it. And we will shut everything down until they start playing exactly how the [IRA] was written and the intent. So, I want all of you to know that very clearly so if you can talk to the Administration, tell them we're all on the same side -- we want energy security, we want fossil cleaner than anywhere else in the world, and we want to develop the new technology for the future."
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