Updated September 14, 2024
On Wednesday, July 31, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee forwarded a permitting reform bill to the full Senate for consideration. The committee vote was a bipartisan 15-4 in favor.
As might be expected with a bipartisan bill, there are things to like and things not to like. It pits our desire to quickly move forward with the clean energy transition against our wishes to minimize further harm to the climate through expanded mining and fossil fuel development.
CCL National supports the bill because it provides most of the key elements of what we are looking for in permitting reform. Recent studies strongly indicated that the net effect of the bill will be to reduce CO2 emissions through 2050, despite provisions to support continued exploration and exports of fossil fuels.
CCL believes the soonest the bill could be considered is during the lame duck, after the election.
Tucson CCL is committed to giving its members access to as much good information as it can, and we will provide links to those here. We will try to abstain from hyperbole, but instead stick to the facts and to present good-faith arguments both for and against.
In the meantime here are some good links with data and food for thought.
Details of the Bill
A 1-page summary from the committee of the bill’s provisions can be read here.
Those who tuned into the CCL National Conference may have heard a discussion that included Xan Fishman with the Bipartisan Policy Center. (You can watch that discussion on YouTube here.) Xan is lead author on a document that provides some context for the key elements of the bill and expands on some of its provisions. You can read it here.
Modeling Results of the Bill
Four respected, nonpartisian system modelers worked together to analyze the impact of the EPRA by breaking down the problem into the four key areas that effect GHG emissions. This approach allowed them to work in parallel and then stack up their findings into an aggregate estimate bounded by both pessimistic and optimistic assumptions for each of those areas: transmission, LHG exports, on-shore fossil fuel leasing , and off-shore fossil fuel leasing.
This data is new as of Sept 10 of this month. Here is a good summary of the results and a short presentation of how the benefit stacks up for each of these areas. The chart below is reproduced from this summary.
The upshot is that the net impact by 2050 is a best case reduction of 15.7 Gigatons (Gt) and a worst case of just 0.4 Gt. The likely outcome is probably going to be somewhere in the middle, probably around 7 or 8 Gt by 2050. This corresponds to a reduction of about 10% over US baseline emissions if nothing is done. Interestingly, note the relatively small emissions potential from the LNG exports, including the possibility that in the low emissions scenario, LNG exports could result in a reduction of GHG emissions, likely because it displaces dirtier technology.
The analysis did not estimate the impact of the technology specific provisions in the bill, particularly geothermal. These could be significant as the bill greatly relaxes the permitting of exploratory geothermal wells.
CCL Analysis
Here is a link to a YouTube presentation by Dana Nucitelli reviewing the bill and the results of energy modeling.
Other Useful Links
The Center for Western Priorities has published a critical assessment of the bill. You can view it here.
Heatmap is an online newsletter that focuses on the climate. They posted two articles, one that take a favorable stance, and one against. You can view the case against article here and the case in favor article here.
Jesse Jenkins from the Princeton Repeat Project has always been a stick-to-the-facts resource on the IRA. He recently recorded a podcast with Jerusalem Demsas and the Atlantic magazine’s new podcast Good on Paper. The discussion focuses on the issues around permitting reform, the difficulty that change poses and the problem that the status quo poses for getting a clean energy economy off the ground.
Check back here frequently — we will add quality resources to this list as they come to our attention.