Jobs and Energy Permitting Act of 2011

Floor Speech

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Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I rise today to support H.R. 2021, the Jobs and Energy Permitting Act; and I want to thank our Energy and Commerce ranking member for providing time.

Representing a heavily industrialized area that's naturally sensitive to air quality issues, I appreciate how the EPA's enactment of Clean Air Act provisions has positively attributed to our goal of cleaner air. For that reason, I have remained hopeful that EPA's administrative air permitting barriers to exploring Alaska's Outer Continental Shelf would be addressed, but they haven't. As such, we continue to see air permits for offshore exploration wells perpetually go back and forth between the producer, the EPA, the Environmental Appeals Board, with no movement towards a final decision.

That's why I am an original cosponsor of the Jobs and Energy Permitting Act, which would rectify several of those process questions so that we can safely and responsibly produce our natural resources in the Arctic Ocean. The EPA needs to have a permit approval system in place that is predictable, workable, and understandable.

When I hear that in the last 5 years Shell has drilled over 400 exploration wells worldwide while waiting for one single permit for Alaska, something's definitely wrong with the process.

While the opponents of this legislation are saying that this bill guts the Clean Air Act, that's just not true, because all this bill does is match EPA's Outer Continental Shelf permitting process with the air permitting process employed by the Department of the Interior in the Gulf of Mexico, a Clean Air Act air permitting process that has been successfully used for decades.

By doing so, we can rest assured that we have a strong, offshore air permitting process, but that these projects are not left in limbo like we have seen with the Environmental Appeals Board in recent years.

I also want to remind my colleagues that this bill just addresses permits for exploration wells where activity typically only lasts for a few days, not production wells where activities last for months.

I have long been a supporter of safe and responsible drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf as these resources are a vital source of energy for the United States. With skyrocketing fuel costs, it is imperative for the U.S. to diversify our energy sources by exploring this area, and this bill is the first step in that process.

I strongly encourage my colleagues to support the bill.

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