Assuming all of the conferees for the energy bill have been selected by then, conference negotiations on the comprehensive legislation are expected to get under way Friday, according to staff members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

At press time Thursday, the Senate had picked its 13 conferees for the energy measure, but the House had not yet announced its choices for up to 60 conferees. The conferees’ task will be to reconcile the differences in the Senate and House energy bills.

Because many of the energy bill issues will be ironed at the staff level, “we envision a swift, productive conference. There may be as few as two meetings with all the conferees, the one this week and one at the end of the conference,” said committee spokeswoman Marnie Funk in a pre-conference update. Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, will chair the conference committee along with Rep. W.J. “Billy” Tauzin (R-LA), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The two Republican lawmakers expect to have an agreement on the energy bill ready for conferees to consider by Oct. 1, according to Funk. A conference report will then be forwarded “shortly thereafter” to the Senate and House for a vote.

Electricity issues are expected to dominate the bill in the wake of the Aug. 14 blackout, but natural gas won’t be overlooked. “I think everyone is keenly aware of the looming price problems with natural gas,” said Bill Wicker, a spokesman for the Democrats on the Senate Energy Committee. “I wouldn’t relegate it to the basement.”

In the coming weeks, the National Petroleum Council is due to release its much-awaited study on natural gas supply and demand, and a congressional task force will report its findings on the fickle gas market to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL). Both are “high-profile” reports, Wicker said. “That’s going to guarantee that nobody’s going to forget about natural gas” in the energy bill.

The staffs of the House and Senate energy panels have put the energy bill issues into Tier I and Tier II categories. “The majority of the issues are Tier II issues that can likely be resolved on the staff level. A substantial number of these will be resolved in the next 10 days,” Funk said.

Tier I issues “will include, but are not limited to,” electricity, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), corporate average fuel efficiency, renewable portfolio standards, climate change, liability provisions in ethanol and Alaska pipeline incentives, she noted.

“Chairman Domenici believes S.14 as amended and his [substitute] electricity amendment most accurately reflect the Senate’s position on energy,” Funk said. This includes the deal that Domenici and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) reached prohibiting FERC from implementing standard market design (SMD) and mandating participation in regional transmission organizations (RTO) until Dec. 31, 2006.

“Nothing in [that] agreement can be interpreted to infer that FERC has authority to mandate participation in RTOs after Dec. 31, 2006. In short, we will leave it to the courts to decide whether FERC has that authority,” Funk said.

The agreement between Domenici and Shelby “was not reached lightly; it has not changed in the wake of the blackout,” she noted.

Although it is not part of the Senate bill, Domenici “strongly supports” opening ANWR to energy development, according to Funk. “If he sees any possibility for including ANWR in the conference report in a way that ensures the 60 votes needed for cloture, he will do so. We likely won’t know until the final hours of the conference whether the provisions in the conference report can draw 60 votes if ANWR is included. [So] ANWR will remain in play until the final hours of the conference.” The House energy bill supports ANWR development.

Domenici has agreed as part of the energy bill to abandon his nuclear energy loan guarantees and purchase agreements in favor of a different avenue for incentivizing the nuclear energy industry, Funk said. “The new provisions are being crafted. They will be addressed later in the conference.”

Like the House, he also believes that climate change “should not be addressed in the context of the energy bill,” she noted.

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