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Santa: States Deterred from Using Authority as ‘Procedural Weapon’ to Stall Projects
The newly enacted energy bill has built-in safeguards to prevent states from using their delegated authority under federal laws as a “procedural weapon” to frustrate the development of interstate natural gas pipeline and liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities, said the head of a major pipeline group Wednesday.
The energy bill “made clear that the states…continue to have their substantive authority” under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA), “however FERC is given some ability to [set] timelines, for there to be a single administrative record and also for some expedited judicial review to make it so that…a state agency [or] opponents of that particular infrastructure can’t use that authority effectively as a procedural weapon to prevent there from being some final word on whether or not a facility can go forward,” said Donald Santa Jr., president of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, during a media briefing sponsored by Energy Daily in Washington, DC.
He also dismissed the idea that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission engage in comparative-type hearings to determine which LNG terminal projects are best suited for the market. Prior to the restructuring of the gas pipeline industry, “FERC conducted very intensive examinations of pipeline applications in which they would attempt to determine was there a source of supply, was there a sufficient market, and in some cases when there were multiple projects proposing to serve the same market, [it would] even engage in comparative hearings. And that was a terribly resource-intensive, time-consuming, litigious process that ultimately…the Commission moved away from and said ‘We’ll let the market be the determinant of need,'” Santa said.
“My sense is that to get into [a situation] where you try to do that for LNG facilities would probably have all the same warts that you had when you tried to do that with interstate [gas] pipelines.”
As for energy issues that will be high priority in the future, Santa said he believes producer access to federal onshore and offshore lands will continue to receive a lot of attention. He hopes that an inventory of oil and natural gas resources on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), which the energy bill requires the Interior Department to complete in six months, will be the “beginning of a more rational dialogue on access to natural gas resources on the federal OCS.”
Santa said he also believes providing interested states with an opportunity to opt out of the moratorium on drilling in much of the OCS “is an idea that merits some further discussion” by lawmakers and policymakers in Washington.
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