Mountain Valley Pipeline

To whom? To your politicians, because right now, one of the biggest opportunities that we have in this country is getting permit reform done, because we live in a country that takes an act of Congress to get a pipeline built.

We own that pipeline, Mountain Valley Pipeline.

It has gotten so difficult to get things built.

You have situations where China can build 10 times the amount of energy infrastructure than we can.

Joe Manchin has been a fantastic energy leader for us.

He understands the human side of energy, and he's just got a tremendous grip.

And like I said, Mountain Valley Pipeline would not have got built without his support.

And I'll tell you the importance of that pipeline because the whole time for eight years, I mean, just so your users understand, Mountain Valley Pipeline, was probably one of the most controversial energy infrastructure built in this country over the last, call it 10 years.

The permitting process for major energy projects is a well-known problem that we've written about extensively over the years.

The issue has slowed a number of oil or gas-related projects, most famously the long-delayed Mountain Valley Pipeline, or MVP, while also impacting the development process for everything from long-distance transmission lines and large-scale wind and solar projects, to the production of metals and critical minerals essential for many energy projects.

So, if it has taken a decade or more to get final approval for some projects, with MVP even requiring an act of Congress, it shouldn't be a great surprise that reforms to the permitting process itself would be slow-moving too.

Changes to the permitting process came with 2023's Fiscal Responsibility Act.

In a move that could complicate the bill's passage, the Trump administration asked a federal court on October 9 to reassess the 2023 approval of the 704 megawatts Revolution Wind Project, which is expected to begin full commercial operation later this year.

The project, located off the Rhode Island coast, began sending power to the grid in March and the last of its 65 turbines was installed in September.

The BAAJA includes a number of significant changes related to NEPA, including making more projects exempt from it, reducing the amount of duplicative analysis, doing more coordinated reviews, expressly codifying that NEPA is defined as a procedural process without mandating specific environmental outcomes, and broadening the use of categorical exclusions.

A categorical exclusion is a class of actions that a federal agency has determined do not have a significant effect on the human environment and do not normally require an environmental assessment, or EA, or environmental impact statement, or EIS.

Right.

We've gotta pass that in the House because, uh, uh, just for context, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which moves natural gas out of northern West Virginia to market, took 14 years to build.

Wow.

We, we built the Empire State Building in one year and 45 days.

Um, you know, um, Toby Rice knows how to make money as we like to say around the office and, um, and his brother Danny.

Um, and they, um, They run a pretty good shop, so they own Mountain Valley Pipeline now, and they're also forward integrating into directly selling LNG, trying to capture more of the value in case Matthew Smith's predictions come true.

So lots of great companies that pay good dividends that are pretty reasonably priced.

But again, these aren't going to be your 10 bangers.

So it was kind of a mixed bag.

And then we passed the IRA with the Mountain Valley Pipeline in it.

And so I'm sort of accustomed to doing things as part of a deal that I think net-net are good for climate.

Um, but I think this month is for trying to make sure that it's, that the net-net is still better, and there's still time to improve this bill.

It had transmission provisions.

It had the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which was very controversial.

That Mountain Valley Pipeline then actually made it into the second of the three kind of modern efforts preceding this one, which was the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which was when there was a threat to default on the debt ceiling from House Republicans who'd said, "We're not going to raise the debt limit unless we do federal permitting reform." And there was an effort to try to get a kind of NEPA judicial review for transmission bargain in there, but the two sides couldn't really align on that, and they settled on what were some pretty, I would say, milquetoast timeline and page limit reforms as well as a study on interregional transfer capacity and the permitting of the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

And then there was the EPRA bill, which I spent a lot of time with a great team of people working on when I was on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee working for Senator Manchin and his staff.

That was a bipartisan negotiated product between Senator Manchin and Barrasso.