In an otherwise restorative year for US energy policy, a large item of business goes unfinished. Reintroduction in the Senate late last month of supposedly comprehensive energy legislation underscores the deficiency.
The Senate bill, sponsored by Energy Committee Chair Lisa Murkowski (R-Alas.) and Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), updates legislation that stalled in a House-Senate conference committee late last year. It addresses a broad range of subjects, such as permitting, infrastructure, and energy efficiency. But it dodges a booming problem: the Renewable Fuel Standard.
Burning food
To dispense with mythology promulgated by the ethanol lobby, the problem is not the encroachment by biofuels into gasoline and diesel markets. Biofuels now claim about as much of the vehicle-fuel markets as they ever will-and more than they should. Ethanol dominates. And only ethanol promoters now think gasoline engines should burn ever-more alcohol made from food. The additive's once-ballyhooed environmental benefits turn out to have been exaggerated. And supply extension has diminished appeal in a market that has swung into chronic surplus.
The main problem with the RFS is that it financially punishes refiners and importers for failure to do the impossible, such as blend more ethanol than the market can use and sell ridiculously more cellulosic biofuel than subsidized producers can supply. The RFS is unjust. It's a product of misguided legislation that should have been repealed long ago. Yet the responsible body of government cowers before the politics of agriculture, as though ending the ethanol mandate would ruin corn farmers and distillers. It wouldn't. Without the mandate, refiners still would blend ethanol into gasoline, just not as much as they now must. With the mandate, they struggle to meet requirements characteristic of a police state. Energy legislation that allows this abomination to persist can be no better than half-baked.
Congress, in fact, has proven to be sporadic on energy. How could a Republican Senate in May defeat a Congressional Review Act resolution to revoke a late-term Obama administration crackdown on methane emissions from oil and gas operations on federal land? Republicans voting against the resolution said the CRA was too heavy a weapon to use on the methane rule, which also provided for an increase in the federal royalty. Wrong. The methane rule itself is too heavy. It's an environmentally unwarranted effort by an administration rushing in its final months to discourage the production and use of oil and gas. The CRA exists to rein in precisely that type of last-minute, Executive Branch expansionism.
Other than these congressional wobbles, the year has been good for energy policy affecting oil and natural gas. More accurately, it has been tough on bad policy. In its first 6 months, the administration of President Donald Trump has reversed many of the state-centered excesses of its predecessor, approving controversial pipelines, slowing methane regulations under development and reviewing companion rules already in place, moving in several ways to reverse massive withdrawals from oil and gas leasing of vast tracts on the Outer Continental Shelf, streamlining federal leasing and permitting, and working to ease regulation of hydraulic fracturing on federal land. The administration has slashed funding of the Environmental Protection Agency, which ran rampant during the Obama years, and installed a tough administrator committed to taming what became a bureaucratic beast. It even budgeted to prepare for leasing of available acreage on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Coastal Plain, proposed the permitting of seismic surveys off the East Coast, and delayed implementation of an unneeded but costly tightening of federal air standards for ozone. Consequent protests of antihydrocarbon activists testify to the wisdom of these initiatives.
Acting with focus
On energy, the Trump administration has acted coherently, consistently, and constructively-perhaps more so than on any other subject. Having a clear suite of errors to correct certainly helped it stay focused and resolved.
Congress has mistakes to fix, too-including one outrageous blunder of its own making. So what's the excuse?