The Permitting Reforms That Federal Lawmakers Should Consider

As part of the agreement to secure Sen. Joe Manchin’s support for the tax, health care, and climate bill the Senate approved last week, House and Senate Democratic leaders reportedly agreed to hold votes this coming September on legislation that would reform the U.S. permitting system for energy projects.

With its partners at the Energy Equipment and Infrastructure Alliance (EEIA), MSCI has long been an advocate for permitting reform. According to the EEIA, possibilities for reform include:

• Directing the president to designate and periodically update a list of at least 25 high-priority energy infrastructure projects and prioritize permitting for these projects;
• Requiring a balanced list of project types, including critical minerals, nuclear, hydrogen, fossil fuels, electric transmission, renewables, and carbon capture, sequestration, storage, and removal;
• Establishing criteria for selecting designated projects so that they reduce consumer energy costs, improve energy reliability, evaluate decarbonization potential, and promote energy trade with our allies;
• Setting maximum timelines for permitting reviews, including two years for environmental reviews for major projects and one year for lower-impact projects;
• Requiring a single inter-agency environmental review document and concurrent agency review processes;
• Designating a lead agency to coordinate inter-agency review;
• Requiring final actions within one year of certification requests: either grant, grant with conditions, deny, or waive certification;
• Clarifying that the basis of a review is limited to water quality impacts from the permitted infrastructure, and not on extraneous areas such as emissions;
• Prohibiting state or tribal agencies from requiring project applicants to withdraw and resubmit applications in order to stop/pause/restart the one-year certification clock;
• Setting a statute of limitations for court challenges to permits;
• Requiring that if a federal court vacates a permit for energy infrastructure, the court must set a reasonable schedule and deadline, not to exceed 180 days, for the responsible agency to act; and
• Completing the Mountain Valley Pipeline by requiring the relevant agencies to take all necessary actions to permit the construction and operation of the Mountain Valley Pipeline and giving the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia jurisdiction over any further litigation.