The United States has a permitting problem.
At a time when energy and natural resource security is more important than ever, we need an all-of-the-above approach to unleash American energy. However, that will not be possible until the Biden administration supports our drillers, miners and energy innovators with tools to help do their jobs. For now, the administration seems focused on the opposite—shutting down domestic production in the long term and placing ill-suited measures on a much larger problem.
President Joe Biden’s recent actions, such as releasing 25 percent of our strategic petroleum reserves, invoking the Defense Production Act for domestic critical minerals supply, and reopening a small fraction of federal land for drilling, do not address the root cause of his domestic energy crisis: permitting.
The reality is that overly burdensome policies and environmentalists’ legal challenges are stopping energy companies before they ever break ground. According to the National Mining Association, Australia and Canada, two countries with equivalent environmental protections as the United States, have mine permitting processes that last two to three years on average.
In the United States, permitting a mine drags on for an average of seven to 10 years!
Instead of making permitting faster, the Biden administration is making it harder. National Environmental Policy Act reviews are notorious for holding up energy and infrastructure projects for years. In 2020, the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality found that it took an average of 4½ years to complete an environmental impact statement under NEPA.
Rather than improving environmental reviews under NEPA, the Biden administration has chosen to make them more burdensome. Recently, the Biden administration rolled back key modernizations the Trump administration made to the more than 40-year-old NEPA regulations.
The Interior Department is sitting on more than 4,000 drilling permits waiting to be approved, and development is being held up in litigation on thousands of leases. The bottom line is that the number of leases aren’t the problem, the permitting and review processes are, and that will not be improving under this administration’s new NEPA regulations.
The administration’s hostility to regulatory reform applies even to types of “clean” energy projects that it praises publicly. Take renewable energy and electric vehicles. The administration has made bold promises to ensure 50 percent of vehicles sold in the United States are electric by 2030 and that all power will be zero emissions by 2035.
To meet those promises will require an exponential increase in the amount of lithium, nickel, cobalt and other so-called critical minerals that go into electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines and solar panels. Based on the Paris Agreement’s goals for greenhouse gas emission reductions, the International Energy Agency estimates global demand for key minerals could increase by between 700 percent and 4,200 percent by 2040 from 2020 levels.
Biden’s accelerated transition to these technologies exposes a major problem. Right now, Russia and China control the supply chains for these minerals. Russia supplies about 20 percent of the world’s Class 1 nickel, and another adversary, China, controls the refining process of 50 percent to 70 percent of lithium and cobalt.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently said that shortages in these materials are raising prices and limiting the adoption of electric vehicles. We have many of those resources here, but we can’t get them out of the ground because the federal government is not issuing permits, leaving us at the mercy of hostile regimes.
If the Biden administration will wake up to the fact the these barriers are hurting all energy projects, from fossil energy to renewables, I stand ready to work across the aisle. These problems are difficult but not insurmountable. We made real progress by codifying the Trump administration’s “One Federal Decision” policy to roads and bridge projects as part of the bipartisan infrastructure bill last year. That policy ensures that project developers have a lead federal agency to work with and won’t be ping-ponged between multiple agencies. It aims to complete the federal environmental review process for any major project within two years, with federal permits and other authorizations issued within 90 days after that.
We could codify the same One Federal Decision policy for mining, drilling, and pipeline projects. We could also codify the commonsense modernizations to the NEPA regulations that the Biden administration is now trying to undo.
That would be a relatively simple first step and provide much-needed regulatory certainty.
Now it is time to come together and reform the environmental review and permitting process to support an all-of-the-above approach to American energy—including oil, gas, coal, nuclear, renewables and critical minerals. Through bipartisan reforms, we can secure our domestic production and export American-produced energy across the globe. I’ll be waiting for the administration to join me.
Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican, is a U.S. Senator for West Virginia. She is the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
(0) comments
Welcome to the discussion.
Log In
Keep it Clean. Please avoid obscene, vulgar, lewd, racist or sexually-oriented language.
PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK.
Don't Threaten. Threats of harming another person will not be tolerated.
Be Truthful. Don't knowingly lie about anyone or anything.
Be Nice. No racism, sexism or any sort of -ism that is degrading to another person.
Be Proactive. Use the 'Report' link on each comment to let us know of abusive posts.
Share with Us. We'd love to hear eyewitness accounts, the history behind an article.