The Biden administration continues to step up its war on natural gas on multiple fronts as part of a costly effort to force through a stalled energy transition through draconian regulations and debt-financed subsidies.
This 2024 offensive began in January, The White House It has baselessly “suspended” approvals for new LNG export facilities in an attempt to stifle the growth of the domestic industry and deny gas producers access to international markets. offered In response to the White House Energy Secretary’s actions Jennifer Granholm And the statements made by other administration spokespeople are patently irrational and fail to hide the obvious political motives at work. (Related: Effort to block new natural gas exports traces back to one Ivy League professor and his questionable research)
Lectures CERAWeek Conference March in Houston Granholm said:“My prediction is that by the time we sit here next year, this will be a thing of the past,” Granholm said, adding that the suspension is “just like any other investigation we’ve had.”
That last part is true, in that conducting environmental impact studies is routine business of the federal government, but she would be hard pressed to identify a precedent where the government has halted progress on an entire sector of a multi-billion-dollar project for a year to conduct an environmental impact study.
The next move in Biden’s fierce attack on natural gas came on April 23, when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) New rules announced It relates to floating mineral leasing on federal lands administered by the BLM, which includes vast swaths of oil- and gas-producing states, including New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Utah.
The new rules severely limit producers’ ability to lease federal lands and significantly increase the cost of doing business through significant increases in royalty rates, permit fees and bond requirements.
Two days later, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency Power plant emissions regulationsWithin days, dozens of state attorneys general filed lawsuits in federal court challenging the new regulations, making the same legal arguments that led courts to strike down similar regulations promulgated during the Obama administration.
This rule is clearly designed to force the closure of all remaining coal-fired power plants in the United States within just a few years, even though coal plants will provide 16% of total U.S. electricity in 2023, more than wind and solar combined. The rule’s burdensome provisions are also a clear effort to block the construction of new natural gas power plants by making financing costs too high, even though natural gas plants generated 43% of U.S. electricity last year. Detail is Biden’s own Energy Information Administration.
The administration’s latest move comes this week when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission circumvented Congress’ legislative authority and FERC Order 1920is a 1,363-page ruling governing the permitting of new transmission lines. The order streamlines the permitting process for new transmission projects, in part, by curtailing the authority of state and local governments.
The problem, however, is that this bill only provides such streamlining for projects that transport electricity generated by renewables. Thus, it is a clear attempt to socialize the costs of regional transmission projects across all 50 states and to exclude other forms of electricity generation by using the permitting process to discriminate against them and take away powers that have been reserved to state and local governments for decades.
That means the Biden administration is trying to eliminate all but its preferred sources of generation at a time when electricity demand is surging at the end of its first and likely only term, raising questions about whether renewables alone can meet that demand. (Related: David Blackmon: Two new studies shed light on Biden’s green energy funding hole)
There’s no denying that current battery technology to back up these intermittent and unpredictable forms of power generation does not provide a satisfactory answer to that question.
Such central planning, using authoritarian command-and-control regulations, has not had a successful track record in the United States over the past few years. Enron Twenty-five years ago, the Biden team clearly believed they were the smartest people in the room, so we are all enjoined to believe that this time, everything will work out just fine.
The thing is, we all remember what happened to Enron.
David Blackmon is a Texas-based energy writer and consultant who worked in the oil and gas industry for 40 years and specializes in public policy and communications.
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