The recent drama over the U.S. debt ceiling may have illustrated the chaos that polarization has brought to Washington, but it also showed something else: There is an appetite for federal tax reform from both Democrats and Republicans. The Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA), signed by President Biden on Saturday, addressed some immediate priorities, including changes to the review process under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), but its mandate to accelerate the end of the valley of the mountain, very delayed. Pipeline (MVP) took many of the project’s supporters and critics by surprise. In today’s RBN blog, we look at the permitting issues that have kept MVP in regulatory limbo and how the FRA is designed to overcome them and bring the project back to life.
Concerns about energy infrastructure permits have permeated public policy for at least a decade, on both sides of the political aisle. On the one hand, the concern for things like new power transmission for renewable energy sources has been dominant, while on the other hand the concern new pipeline infrastructure such as MVP has been the protagonist. (For more information, see our You don’t pass me by The entire permitting debate reached a fever pitch as both Congress and the Biden administration became deeply concerned about the reliability and national security of our energy mix after events like the Blackout from winter storm Uri Texas.
We’ve chronicled MVP’s long, long journey in the years since it was proposed (most recently in It will go in circles). It received its certificate from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in 2017 and construction began in early 2018. But as the project wandered through the permitting jungle (even after to issue a FERC certificate, a project must obtain permits at the state level). , primarily US Army Corps of Engineers water permits at the federal level, but with the state’s ability to obstruct them), we saw that permit after permit had been issued, just to be removed by a reversal from the US Court of Appeals after being challenged by the environment. groups (which is somewhat ironic given the net emissions benefits of the pipeline, as we discussed in Ghosts of Pipelines Past and Future). But just as MVP was once again testing the resolve of its backers with another reversed permit, the debt ceiling crisis arrived. As anyone with access to any news knows, we went through the periodic tussle of trying to reconcile US budget policy with the basic act of avoiding a debt default we’ve already incurred. If we hadn’t gone through this process before, it would have been pretty scary, actually, this time was quite scary, given the polarization of our government at the moment.
