Bush administration officials will appear before Congress this week to testify for the first time about the federal government’s efforts to recover and restore the energy infrastructure facilities along the hurricane-damaged Gulf Coast.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and Interior Secretary Gale Norton are scheduled to appear before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Thursday to discuss rebuilding efforts and needed policy changes. This will be the third post-hurricane hearing for the panel. The Senate committee heard mostly industry accounts of damage to energy facilities during the first two hearings, along with suggested policy revisions (see Daily GPI, Oct. 7).

Both Bodman and Norton have commented on the administration’s recovery efforts in the weeks since Hurricane Katrina struck in late August, but neither has been on Capitol Hill to discuss the rebuilding progress (see Daily GPI, Sept. 14, Oct. 5).

The hearing on Thursday will be “wide open, anything goes,” with questions ranging from the need for a gasoline reserve to expanded access for drillers to the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) to price gouging, said Bill Wicker, a spokesman for Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, the ranking Democrat on the Senate energy committee.

There will be “very few parameters” to the questions posed by Senate lawmakers, he noted. “It has the potential of being pretty interesting.”

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