US seeks to speed permits by limiting reviews

President Donald Trump's administration today finalized a rule that attempts to expedite approval of federal oil and gas leases, pipelines, highways and other infrastructure by curtailing environmental reviews.

The overhaul aims to simplify reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) so that federal permitting of pipelines and other projects could be done within two years. Critics say the administration is trying to gut a law meant to require regulators to take a "hard look" at how approving a project would affect communities and the environment.

NEPA has become a growing vulnerability for the oil sector. A judge last week ordered the 530,000 b/d Dakota Access crude pipeline to close due to flaws with its environmental review. The 830,000 b/d Keystone XL crude pipeline was unable to start construction in 2018 for similar reasons. A judge last year blocked hundreds of drilling leases in Wyoming for incomplete climate change studies.

Trump today said the "top-to-bottom overhaul" of environmental reviews would remove roadblocks to building infrastructure and provide billions of dollars in cost savings. Trump has regularly criticized environmental reviews as unnecessary and too costly, drawing on his previous career as a real estate developer where his projects were subject to complex permitting requirements.

"I have been wanting to do this since day one," Trump said.

The US enacted the statute in 1970 with a broad mandate for the government to study how its actions could affect the environment before making a decision. White House regulations and decades of court rulings have fleshed out what the law requires, resulting in reviews that can be hundreds of pages long and take years to complete.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality, in the changes today, is seeking to reset some of that process by issuing a rule curtailing what types of reviews are required. The changes would allow reviews to focus narrowly on near-term environmental effects, such as soil erosion from constructing a pipeline, while avoiding the study of long-term effects such as how burning fossil fuels transported by a pipeline could affect climate change.

Oil groups cheered the overhaul. The changes are "desperately needed," American Petroleum Institute president Mike Sommers said, and would "make sure that job-creating infrastructure projects get off the drawing board and into development." Independent Petroleum Association of American president Barry Russell said the revisions would provide "needed certainty" to businesses.

The NEPA changes are coming too late to have an effect on the Trump administration's approval of projects such as the Dakota Access pipeline or its decision to allow oil and gas development within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. And the changes are likely to increase uncertainty in the near-term, as agencies figure out how to conduct reviews under the new rules. US courts might decide if the changes are lawful on a project-by-project basis.

Environmentalists are planning a major fight against the changes, which they say will be most harmful to low-income and minority communities that have used NEPA to oppose projects that would boost emissions near their neighborhoods. Critics say the government should undertake more robust reviews of whether projects would exacerbate climate change, rather than ignoring most of those effects.

"We will not allow this blatant polluter power-grab to stand," Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman said. "We will see them in court."

Presumed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, if elected, would have a pathway to blocking the changes by undertaking a new review. If Democrats win control of the US Senate and retain control of the US House of Representatives, they could also vote to disapprove the change and quickly revert back to the earlier rules.

By Chris Knight