The Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA)—whose primary goal was to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling—addressed some immediate priorities around federal permitting for energy and infrastructure projects and sought to accelerate completion of the long-delayed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), but it did more than that. Its passage provided a glimmer of hope for those wanting a renewed focus on authorization issues, while also serving to underscore how much progress is still needed. In today’s RBN blog, we look at the other key sections of the FRA, where Congress might look next to address permitting reform, and why further progress may be difficult to achieve.
In the first blog In this series, we looked at the permitting issues that have kept MVP in regulatory limbo and how the FRA is designed to overcome them and bring the natural gas pipeline project back to life. We also discussed some of the other parts of the legislation, including changes to the review process for energy projects under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). As we described in our Do not do it The Pass Me By series, allowing can be a complicated and long process that can drag on for years and prevent some projects from becoming a reality. Much of this blog focused on the fate of MVP, which has been stymied for years. (For more on MVP, check out our weekly NATGAS Appalachia Report.) As an example of how long some projects can take, we also looked at the TransWest Express Transmission Project, which will transfer 3,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity generated by Wyoming wind to utilities in more densely populated regions of the desert southwest. Although it’s a simple idea, the project didn’t receive final federal approval until April, 18 years after it was first proposed, and serves as a good example of how long it can take to get through the way to final approval. New transmission lines like the TransWest Express are vitally important to the development of wind and solar power generation, which are sinking deeper and deeper. local authorization issues.
While the FRA includes a variety of budget control elements, allows the US to avoid hitting the debt ceiling until 2025, and aims to accelerate the completion of MVP, it also reforms how NEPA interacts with agency actions to approve energy projects. (See Figure 1 below for an illustration of how a project moves through the NEPA process.) Among other things, the FRA includes several changes that have been mentioned in many reform proposals in the past.
