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WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY: Good afternoon and happy Wednesday, readers! And we have a winner for Fat Bear Week, a bear known as “89 Backpack” was crowned the chonkiest of them all at Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve.
After months of anticipation, the Senate has released its draft text for a bill that would streamline the federal permitting system. It is a major sign of bipartisanship in the upper chamber before the midterm elections, though the bill faces an uphill battle to pass when Congress returns. We have some of the highlights for you below.
Welcome to Daily on Energy, written by Washington Examiner energy and environment writers Callie Patteson (@CalliePatteson) and Maydeen Merino (@MaydeenMerino). Email cpatteson@washingtonexaminer dot com or mmerino@washingtonexaminer dot com for tips, suggestions, calendar items, and anything else. If a friend sent this to you and you’d like to sign up, click here. If signing up doesn’t work, shoot us an email, and we’ll add you to our list.
THE PERMITTING DEAL IS HERE:
The Senate has officially introduced a bipartisan legislative package aimed at accelerating the federal permitting process – and it’s a whopper.
The draft bill, which is more than 400 pages long, is considered crucial to facilitating the connection of renewable energy to the grid and the expedited construction of new power plants and other electricity-generating projects that will be used to power artificial intelligence.
We’re still going through the lengthy bill, but here are some of the highlights so far:
Permit certainty: The legislation includes provisions long sought by Democrats that would ensure the executive branch cannot delay or block the permitting of energy projects, regardless of the resource. This would also prevent future Democratic administrations from canceling fossil fuel permits.
Additionally, it would order the fair treatment of all energy resources when issuing new permits for projects, including but not limited to onshore wind, offshore wind, coal, natural gas, nuclear, and geothermal.
Transmission infrastructure: The bill also gives the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission more authority to approve interstate power lines and process transmission infrastructure applications at the same time as state reviews. This is a top priority for Democrats, who have been seeking to connect thousands of gigawatts worth of solar, storage, and wind capacity to the broader electric grid.
Reforming bedrock environmental laws: Additionally, the legislation would streamline permitting by reforming provisions of several existing laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the Clean Water Act.
Most notably, the bipartisan bill would tweak judicial review requirements under these laws, setting a new deadline of just 150 days for groups to legally challenge environmental reviews.
Lingering tensions: In announcing the deal, key Democratic negotiator Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse told reporters that the question of “returning to regular order” for renewable energy projects with the Trump administration was still “unresolved.”
“We have had what I would consider to be a very reasonable opening proposal from the Trump administration. We need more clarity on that,” he said. “And when we have more clarity on that, there’ll be back and forth to try to resolve those issues. That will happen in parallel with the amendment work, and we look forward to good results on that.”
Last week, the White House indicated that it would pull its support for the bill if Democrats continued to stall, as party negotiators said they were punting a vote to after the midterm elections. As of this afternoon, however, the White House was still backing the bill.
“We support this deal, which will deliver transformative policies to lower Americans’ energy and housing costs, drive new construction and investment in American infrastructure, and create American jobs,” a White House official told Daily on Energy. “We look forward to seeing it pass quickly.”
What’s next? Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Shelley Moore Capito told reporters that the upper chamber plans to make the permitting bill its first vote once returning from the midterm elections.
While optimism filled the halls of the Capitol today, history will remind us that between now and November, there is plenty of time for a bipartisan permitting deal to fall apart.
To read the full 417-page bill for yourself – be sure to pour a cup of coffee or glass of bourbon for the read – click here.
All the rest:
DEMOCRATS TANK RATEPAYER PROTECTION ACT AHEAD OF MIDTERMS: Senate Democrats today blocked the Ratepayer Protection Act from advancing out of the chamber, keeping Republicans from getting a win weeks before the midterm elections.
The bill fell short by a vote of 57 to 43 with four Democrats in favor: Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.
Passage would give the bill’s sponsor, Republican Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, a boost.
Husted is a vulnerable incumbent who is running against former Sen. Sherrod Brown. Husted has faced Democratic attacks over data centers.
Democrats argued that Husted’s bill, which passed with bipartisan support in the House, was “toothless” because it does not set a federal standard on data centers to pay the cost of new generation, transmission, and infrastructure upgrades.
Sen. Martin Heinrich said Wednesday on X that “The Ratepayer Protection Act is exactly what Congress is known for: all message and no substance.”
“It’s not enough for us to tell states to consider making data centers pay for grid upgrades. If voluntary worked, we wouldn’t need legislation,” he added. “I want Congress to pass legislation with real teeth. Until then, I’m a NO on this bill.”
Read more by David Sivak and Maydeen Merino here.
COMING UP AT THE WHITE HOUSE – AN INVESTMENT IN ALASKA LNG: In less than an hour, President Donald Trump is expected to announce a major investment from South Korea in the U.S., with $54 billion being dedicated to a liquefied natural gas pipeline in Alaska.
The investment is part of the country’s plans to invest about $200 billion in the U.S., Bloomberg reported.
The 800-mile pipeline is intended to start in Prudhoe Bay, along the Arctic Ocean, where the existing Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, also around 800 miles long, begins. The project will also include the construction of a liquefaction facility to cool and condense the gas for exporting.
The pipeline would make it easier for the U.S. to ship LNG to trade partners across the Pacific, helping achieve Trump’s goal of increasing exports of U.S. energy products and tapping Alaska’s oil and gas resources.
A costly project: The pipeline has long been considered a risky project, due to its high capital costs and the tough, icy terrain of Alaska. It has also been criticized by environmentalists, who seek to curb fossil fuel development in the state.
The Alaska LNG project is expected to cost at least $44 billion and possibly more than $54 billion. For comparison, the first phase of the Keystone Pipeline, which stretches more than 2,000 miles from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska, cost roughly $5.2 billion to build.
Besides South Korea, Alaska is also looking to Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan to fund the pipeline’s construction.
Read more from Callie here.
DOMESTIC DRILLERS REACT TO EXTENDED OIL INSTABILITY: There is widespread agreement among oil and gas executives in the U.S. that the war in Iran is spreading chaos through global energy markets that will take months to recover from.
Earlier this morning, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas released its third quarterly survey of this year of oil and gas executives, featuring anonymous remarks from the domestic drillers. Several explained that they feel uneasy with the current state of the markets, saying it has become difficult to plan pricing and budgeting for the rest of the year and even 2027.
“Increased geopolitical volatility, including tariffs, increasing cost of doing business and increasing lead times for execution are issues affecting our business,” one exploration and production executive said.
“There will be continuing lack of predictable pricing as long as the current war is continuing,” another said. “That war needs to be concluded, with the destruction of Iran’s ability to continue it.”
Some predictions: As part of the survey, the executives were asked how long they believed it would take for gas and diesel prices to return to levels seen last year. Nearly 50% of those surveyed said they believed it would take more than four quarters for diesel to return to 2025 prices, while just over a third said it would take the same time frame for gasoline to fall that low.
Additionally, the executives were asked when they expected crude oil exports from the Persian Gulf to return to pre-war levels. Most anticipated exports would resume normal flows next year, with just over 25% saying during the second quarter of 2027.
ENTERGY TALKS NUCLEAR ENERGY: To meet the growing demands of artificial intelligence and increased domestic manufacturing, several utilities are looking to nuclear power for securing baseload energy – even after having abandoned nuclear projects in recent years.
Utility company Entergy currently owns and operates about four nuclear power plants. In past years, the company has run nearly a dozen. Entergy used to operate multiple well-known facilities, such as the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant in Michigan and Indian Point in New York, both of which it closed.
Entergy CEO Drew Marsh told Callie this week that the company never wanted to abandon these sites, particularly Indian Point in 2021.
“That was not our first choice,” he said, adding that Entergy had been working for years to relicense the facility, which was the company’s most economical nuclear power plant.
“We’d been getting a lot of pressure from the state on how to manage that facility,” Marsh said. “Costs were going up because of all those things – the general environment to nuclear in that point in time was much less favorable. So, we made the tough decision to turn those plants off.”
As for Palisades, which is being reopened by Holtec International, Marsh said the Biden administration had even pushed for Entergy to keep the plant open, calling one month before the closure in 2022.
“We did not have fuel to continue to operate the plant, even if we wanted to at that point, so we decided that the best option was to allow Holtec to go ahead and take it,” Marsh said. “They were slated to take ownership to decommissioning the plant at that point in time, and the administration worked with them to try and turn that around to a different outcome.”
Entergy is exploring more nuclear power opportunities throughout its service region, including through small modular reactors and large AP1000s.
When asked if the company is in talks with the Trump administration to support the construction of one of the large reactors – Trump has ordered for 10 to be under construction by 2030 – Marsh said Entergy has “been in talks with just about everybody about any possible combination.”
“We’re working hard to figure it out, and so that is something that we’re thinking through,” he said.
A MASSIVE NUCLEAR-POWERED DATA CENTER FACILITY ON UTAH PUBLIC LAND: The start-up nuclear company Valar Atomics plans to make hundreds of reactors and data centers on public land in Utah.
NPR reported that the company plans to build what it calls “Project Beehive” on over 9,000 acres of public land near Price, Utah. The project would include data centers and about 456 small nuclear reactors, along with a facility to produce nuclear fuel and storage for nuclear waste.
In total, the reactors would produce around 9.6 gigawatts of power for the data centers. For context, the entire state of Utah produces only around 4 gigawatts of power. The project is expected to begin non-nuclear construction by the end of the year, with the first reactor coming online in 2028.
ICYMI – SENATE PASSES CURTIS WILDFIRE EMISSIONS BILL: The Senate yesterday unanimously approved a bill from Republican Sen. John Curtis of Utah meant to help states prevent wildfires.
The legislation, the Wildfire Emissions Prevention Act, would allow local and state governments to streamline the use of prescribed fires to prevent wildfire emissions.
“t makes no sense to leave a critical tool like controlled burns off the table,” Curtis said yesterday on the floor. “Prescribed fire is one of the most effective ways to reduce hazardous fuels and prevent catastrophic wildfires.”
RUNDOWN
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
