On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of Senators released an energy permitting reform bill. There are already some great explainers on the bill overall and on the transmission provisions specifically.
In short, the bill would make it easier to build all types of energy-related infrastructure projects in America quickly, in an attempt to better balance our society’s need for more, cleaner, cheaper energy with the need to protect the environment and our historic buildings and places in the process.
The text is notably light on provisions directly related to carbon management. The full carbon capture and removal value chains are explicitly designated as part of the slew of clean energy project types that would benefit from the overall reforms to existing environmental statutes like NEPA and NHPA.
But there aren’t many carbon management-specific items in the bill. For example, the bill does not touch on Class VI updates to accelerate CO2 storage permitting, FERC jurisdiction over CO2 pipelines to enable interstate pipelines to get sited more effectively, or a host of other carbon removal-specific permitting changes related to everything from biomass injection in the subsurface to adding alkalinity to the ocean.
For me, the lack of carbon management provisions in this bill is neither a big disappointment nor a sign that the bill isn’t particularly meaningful for the carbon management field.
The lack of carbon management provisions in this bill is not a huge setback for the field because federal permits are not the primary hurdle holding back carbon management projects today. Most carbon management project developers can work their way through the process of getting a federal permit (albeit slowly and at considerable expense). The federal permitting processes related to carbon management can and should be improved, but carbon management’s biggest issue today is demand, in that there is far too little demand for projects to move forward with any meaningful pace or scale. When demand is no longer the primary issue, the field can turn to permitting — just like the in-demand clean energy field has today.
Second, the fact that this bill is light on specifics for carbon management doesn’t mean that whether or not this bill turns into law isn’t important for the field. I actually think it might be one of the more important bills for the future of carbon management since the Inflation Reduction Act.
The reason it is so important is that it will reveal whether America has a federal government capable of bipartisan compromise to build large infrastructure projects quickly and with strong environmental protection. If Democrats are unwilling to take this deal today, it means that they are so concerned about slowing down fossil fuel projects that they are willing to slow down renewable energy projects too — even if such a slow down would be much worse for renewables than for fossil fuels and raise energy prices considerably as a result. If Republicans are unwilling to take this deal today despite control of the Senate and House and with Trump’s explicit blessing for the deal, it will reveal a level of dysfunction and factionalism whose depths seem difficult to fathom, let alone dig out from anytime soon.
If this bill fails to become law, I don’t think the prospects for permitting reform will get better anytime soon. If Democrats take over Congress in subsequent elections, they will need to have a supermajority to overcome Republican opposition. But supermajorities seem unlikely for a Democratic party so concerned with fossil fuels that they are willing to fight what everyone thinks is a great deal for clean energy because it would make it somewhat easier to build fossil fuel infrastructure. How they win in places like Texas, Alaska, or even Pennsylvania — and how they deliver lower energy prices for constituents — with a policy platform dogmatically opposed to fossil fuels is highly unclear to me.
Failing to pass permitting reform would be a huge loss for carbon management for several reasons. For one, carbon management projects — especially some removal technologies like direct air capture — are going to require a lot of clean energy. If we can’t compromise to build this clean energy quickly, carbon management will be a casualty as powering it will be expensive.
Additionally, if we can’t permit clean energy quickly due to onerous and outdated environmental statutes, there’s good reason to think that carbon management projects will face the same fate in the future even if the field can pass policies in the near term to create the demand pull that clean energy projects enjoy today.
If this bill fails, it will also signal that our Congress can’t reach bipartisan compromises on the topics that would have been slam dunk bipartisan compromises even a decade ago. This decline in bipartisanship almost certainly would be bad news for carbon management, which has a long history of bipartisan legislative successes. If the ability for bipartisanship in Congress has eroded so far that we can’t do a permitting reform deal right now, the fate of new carbon management legislation will hinge on partisan (1) Republican bills (which is unlikely for a climate-denying party), or (2) Democratic bills (which is unlikely given that carbon management isn’t renewable energy and is associated with the incumbent oil and gas industry). And then even if partisan carbon management bills do pass, they risk reversal once the political winds shift — unmistakably bad news for projects that require policy certainty over decadal timeframes to work.
But the biggest issue of all for carbon management if this bill fails is what that failure portends for the overall ability of our democracy to reach compromise on issues of national importance. If we can’t do permitting reforming, we likely can’t do tax reform needed to balance our federal budget, pass durable policies to encourage economic growth, and avoid costly foreign wars of choice. Believing that a society that can’t do these fundamental governance tasks can marshal the funding and resolve to do carbon management at climate-relevant scale seems increasingly implausible…
…So let’s cheer for this permitting bill to pass. And then the carbon management community can get to work on a carbon management-specific permitting reform bill that can follow in this bill’s footsteps.