Committing Leases for Energy Access Now Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. STANSBURY. Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chair, I am happy to be here once again on another set of energy bills and amendments. While I certainly support the goal of this bill to deploy more clean, renewable geothermal energy on our public lands, unfortunately I and other members of our Caucus are unable to support this bill in its current form and urge opposition to the bill.

Throughout this Congress, geothermal energy has been a bright spot of bipartisanship. Geothermal is an extremely promising and growing source of sustainable and reliable renewable energy.

We have heard from geothermal developers that there can be challenges to permitting new plants and new facilities, so we understand the intent of this bill. That is why our committee has worked on a bipartisan basis to get to solutions that will help support the industry and deploy more renewable energy.

I am grateful to my colleagues who have taken up this issue, bills like the Geothermal Cost-Recovery Authority Act from Ranking Member Ocasio-Cortez, the GEO Act from Representative Curtis, and H.R. 6474 from Representative Steel and others.

I was pleased to see these responsible permitting solutions pass the House, and I hope to see Senate action on them soon and continued bipartisan work.

Unfortunately, this bill is not in a place where we can offer bipartisan support.

H.R. 1449, the CLEAN Act, does contain some important provisions that we would be supportive of, but it also contains some serious technical flaws that could create major constraints and unintended consequences for geothermal projects.

First, the bill mandates that more geothermal lease sales happen. Democrats, in general, support this. We want to see additional geothermal facilities and the use of our Federal resources where appropriate to do that. We would love to see more resources offered through our agencies so that they can actually do this work, but we will take it as it is.

Next, however, the bill says that the Department of the Interior must notify an applicant for a geothermal drilling permit as to whether the application is complete within 30 days. When the Department of the Interior testified on the bill, they recommended increasing the timeline to 90 days to provide sufficient time for the limited situations where staffing, project size, or complexity would prevent an office from complying. For example, let's say an office is understaffed at the moment.

We offered this change in committee and again today are offering it on the House floor. Ranking Member Grijalva's amendment would change the first deadline from 30 days to 90 days, an easy fix. We are willing to negotiate on the exact number, but unfortunately, we have not had willing partners in that negotiation. They are continuing to insist on a timeline that is not workable for our Federal Government.

Next, and most problematically, the bill would require that the Department of the Interior make a final decision on a permit, either approving or denying it, within 30 days of the application being complete. The Department has called this essentially impossible to achieve. Issuing a decision within 30 days would not allow adequate time to complete the analysis required under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. There are other permits from other agencies, like Fish and Wildlife, EPA, and Tribal consultation that must occur before a permit can be issued.

In the best case scenario, this bill would result in uncoordinated, rushed approvals where the Department and our communities barely understand the potential environmental and cultural impacts required by law, which would result in lawsuits and delay projects even further.

In a worst case scenario, good, worthy projects could get denied simply because an agency doesn't have sufficient staffing and time to comply with the deadline in the bill.

All the possible scenarios here are just a bad deal for geothermal developers and a bad deal for Americans who would like to see clean energy deployed responsibly, effectively, and quickly. To solve this, we filed several amendments at markup for consideration on the floor to provide necessary flexibility and time to complete the reviews and prevent avoidable denials, but unfortunately, those were not taken up at the committee level.

I will also point out that the House passed a bill along these lines by voice vote earlier this year. The GEO Act from Representative Curtis of Utah addresses similar permitting concerns but directs the Department to issue a decision on a permit within 60 days of the completion of the review under NEPA and other laws. That is a Republican-led bill that the agency believes they can work with, so we have a possibility of a path forward.

Even in the Senate, we have a Manchin-Barrasso bipartisan permitting bill that would adopt similar language to make a more workable timeline, which is similar to the amendment offered by Ranking Member Grijalva today.

We hope that our colleagues across the aisle will come to the negotiating table if this bill does move forward. It is important that we fix these timelines. I understand that we are trying to expedite and improve the deployment and permitting of these projects, but we have to make sure that they are workable from a practical standpoint within our communities and agencies.

We want positive outcomes, clean energy, and geothermal. This is a bipartisan issue. We can do this. Let's come to the table and get something done that we can all support. Unfortunately, today, I have to urge opposition to this bill.

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Ms. STANSBURY. Mr. Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I want to respond to one comment that was just made about the employees of the Department of the Interior.

For many folks who are not familiar with the Department of the Interior, I will note that there have been people in history who have called it the department of everything because it manages our public lands, water resources and reservoirs, wildlife through the Fish and Wildlife Service, and mineral leasing. It does our geologic surveys. It manages and provides programs and responsibilities to our Tribal nations. The reason why there are 70,000 employees in the Department of the Interior is because they work across all of those bureaus and missions.

The reality is, if you have ever had to work with the Federal Government, Mr. Chair, is that many of these kinds of decisions are made at the most local level in a field office in the Bureau of Land Management, which is the agency responsible for permitting at the most local level. Oftentimes, the agencies find themselves with staff vacancies, a lack of resources, or they have multiple permits come across the desk of a local resource manager.

To expect somebody who is working in a field office, potentially in a rural or remote area of the United States, to process a sophisticated permit and all the related interagency and interbureau coordination and Tribal consultation required in 30 days is just not realistic. While I appreciate the assertion, that is just not how it works.

Let's be reasonable. We all want the same outcome. Let's not create a law that just results in lawsuits and difficulties for our Federal agencies so that we can move on and get this done.

Mr. Chair, I appreciate the debate. Democrats are strong proponents of geothermal energy and support the intent of this bill. This technology is critical for the clean energy transition, jobs, and replacing other kinds of energy.

We want to see responsible development in relation to our public lands. To make that goal a reality, Democrats have supported bipartisan legislation that increases efficiency in permitting processes and other legislation that gets at the same challenges that this bill is trying to address without taking away the necessary environmental and community input.

Unfortunately, there are technical aspects of this bill, including the timelines, that are just not realistic.

In addition to those arbitrary timelines that would undercut community voices and potential protections in sensitive places, this would make projects themselves more vulnerable to delays should lawsuits happen or there are shoddy reviews or a lack of outside input.

I want us to be good bipartisan partners to all of you in this work, but we really do have to come up with some commonsense fixes.

Mr. Chair, as I mentioned just a few moments ago, I hope that we can work together to resolve those technical issues. I ask my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the bill as it is currently drafted, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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