Congress Must Seize the Opportunity to Pass the Energy Permitting Reform Act

It takes too long and wastes too many public and private resources to build energy infrastructure in the United States. The Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 aims to change that. This bill would streamline the permitting process for energy and mineral projects across the United States, cutting down on wasteful delays and saving taxpayer dollars in the process.

Key provisions include:

• Reducing the burden of aimless lawsuits: Our recent report found that NEPA litigation is most often abused by environmental NGOs seeking to obstruct projects and rarely improves environmental outcomes. These results underscore the urgent need for common-sense guardrails in the judicial review process like those in this bill. Specific provisions would give the public 150 days to challenge environmental reviews in court and encourage Judges to close cases quickly. While this wouldn’t eliminate baseless lawsuits, these reforms would help reduce the risk of exorbitant delay.

• Creating flexible guardrails for transmission buildout: As the demand for electricity climbs, so will the need for more power lines. The bill would make it easier to build and pay for new transmission projects while also maximizing the efficiency of existing infrastructure. Specific provisions direct FERC to create a process for building new lines between power markets and ensure they’re only paid for by those who benefit directly.

• Minimizing redundancy and increasing accountability for the mining industry: Our work has consistently shown that the clean energy transition will require expanded mining of critical minerals. The mining provision in this bill would ensure that’s done responsibly on American soil, maintaining strong environmental safeguards while improving regulatory efficiency. Specifically, the bill would streamline the process of building ore milling infrastructure needed to support hardrock mines. At the same time, the bill would create a new program providing much-needed funding to accelerate national abandoned mine cleanup efforts.

• Expediting development of both clean energy and fossil fuel resources: The bill would broadly simplify permitting by reducing delays and eliminating duplicative paperwork for oil, gas, coal, renewable energy, energy storage, hydropower, geothermal and LNG export projects. These reforms promise to dramatically improve permitting procedures for clean energy in particular, by instructing agencies to create categorical exclusions for geothermal, low-disturbance renewables, and transmission line upgrades.

Several environmental groups jumped to paint this bill as a hand-out for the oil and gas industry. Not only does this absolutist mindset show disregard for pragmatic policy-making, it ignores the fact that the bill produces a clear net-benefit for climate efforts. The accelerating trajectory of new clean energy technologies means that clean energy deployment will benefit from these provisions to a greater degree than fossil energy sources. Activists demanding regulatory and permitting rules that benefit only their preferred technologies is a recipe for political gridlock and institutional dysfunction.

For the United States to confront the daunting challenge of revitalizing its energy infrastructure, Congress must take sustained action to ensure new energy technologies can be built quickly, responsibly, and affordably. The Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 takes an important step in the right direction.