American Oil and Gas Reporter - March 2017 - 28

Trump Energy Policy

Actions Indicate Change Of Direction
By Bill Campbell
WASHINGTON-Like a brilliant sun
rising in a cloudless sky, President Donald
Trump's first days in office appeared to
signal a new day for U.S. energy policy.
But a flurry of executive actions may
be better viewed as a door opening than
a dawning, indicate a couple veteran
Washington observers. A lot of twists and
turns lay between turning concepts into
concrete actions.
"These (executive actions) are preliminary guidance that say, 'This is how we
are going to be doing things in a Trump administration,'" assesses Christopher Guith, senior vice president for policy at the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for
21st Century Energy. "The memoranda
and executive orders themselves don't always change things, per se, as much as
they tell everyone how things are going to
get changed."
After observing how President Obama
was very aggressive about federalizing regulation, especially in the fossil fuel arena,
Independent Petroleum Association of
America Executive Vice President Lee
Fuller remarks, "We now have an administration saying that is not the right direction. We need less regulation coming
from the federal government."
While welcome, Fuller adds, "Turning
that attitude into a series of pragmatic steps
will take a couple years, I suspect, at a minimum."
The Trump administration signaled
the general direction of its energy policy
on Inauguration Day by replacing on the
White House website, former President
Obama's Climate Action Plan with an
America First Energy Plan "committed to
eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and
the waters of the United States rule," while
promising to "embrace the shale oil and
gas revolution to bring jobs and prosperity to millions of Americans."
That same day, Trump signed a memorandum instructing executive departments and agencies to immediately withdraw any pending regulation that had
not been published as of Jan. 20. The memorandum also ordered agencies to postpone
for 60 days, all regulations that already had
been published, but had not taken effect.
Such a regulatory freeze is standard
practice, Guith says. "The Obama administration did it; the Bush administration did
it," he recalls.
Nor does the order affect key regula28 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

tions of primary concern to the upstream
industry, Fuller acknowledges. "The Obama administration was really rather effective at completing its (oil and gas) regulatory package before it left," he says. "The
Bureau of Land Management's hydraulic
fracturing, and venting and flaring rules,
and the Environmental Protection
Agency's Subpart OOOOa (methane
emissions) all were completed before the
administration ended. These issues now either are in litigation and/or we are seeing
attempts to repeal them using the Congressional Review Act (see story page 33)."
Among the regulations caught by the
freeze, Guith and Fuller cite, are the
Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety
Administration's final safety rule for onshore hazardous liquid pipelines announced Jan. 13, the BLM's final rule setting royalty rates for shale oil and the
process for establishing commercial leases, and an Internal Revenue Service guidance on what energy projects qualify as
master limited partnerships.
Construct Pipelines
On Jan. 24, President Trump signed a
series of memoranda and executive orders
on matters that included:
* Construction of the Keystone XL
and Dakota Access pipelines;
* Streamlining permitting and reducing regulatory burdens for domestic manufacturing; and
* Expediting environmental reviews
and approvals for high priority infrastructure projects.
The Dakota Access Pipeline memorandum instructs the Army corps of Engineers
to "approve in an expedited manner . . . requests for approvals to construct and operate the DAPL, including easements or
rights of way." It also directs the corps to
withdraw its Jan. 18 notice of intent to prepare an environmental impact statement
relative to Dakota Access LLC's request
for an easement to cross Lake Oahe.
Although pipeline opponents vowed to
continue their legal challenge, the corps
granted the easement to drill under Lake
Oahe on Feb. 8, and terminated the EIS
(see story page 16). A spokeswoman for
Energy Transfer Partners told reporters it
would take approximately 60 days to
drill under the lake and another 23 days to
fill the line to Patoka, Il.
The Keystone memorandum invited
TransCanada Corporation to re-submit its
application for a cross-border permit and
gave the State Department 60 days to

make a determination. It also directed the
secretary of state to consider its January
2014 final supplemental environmental
impact statement as satisfying all applicable requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered
Species Act.
Two days later, TransCanada announced it had submitted a new presidential permit application. In making the announcement, President and Chief Executive Officer Russ Girling stated, "This privately funded infrastructure project will
help meet America's growing energy
needs as well as create tens of thousands
of well-paying jobs and generate substantial economic benefit throughout the United States and Canada. KXL will strengthen U.S. energy security, and remains in the
national interest."
Promoting Infrastructure
President Trump's "Presidential Memorandum Streamlining Permitting and
Reducing Regulatory Burdens for Domestic Manufacturing" and his "Executive Order Expediting Environmental Reviews
and Approvals for High Priority Infrastructure Projects" are less likely to demonstrate
such immediate results.
Environmental review is an area where
"there is only so much discretion," reflects
Guith. He says, "Even if the president says
'go faster,' if you run afoul of NEPA, you
will get sued and lose."
The executive order authorizes the
chairman of the White House Council on
Environmental Quality to designate infrastructure projects as "high priority" on request by a state governor, or executive department or agency head. It then instructs
CEQ to coordinate with relevant agencies
"expedited procedures and deadlines for
completing environmental reviews and approvals."
That, Guith says, "potentially can empower CEQ to be a stronger voice in interagency collaboration; sort of making
sure the trains run on time and everyone
does his job as quickly as is reasonably
possible."
Fuller explains that the memorandum on
streamlining permitting and reducing regulatory burdens instructs the secretary of
commerce to solicit input from stakeholders and the public, and then to recommend
to the president ways to accomplish both.
Once a secretary has been confirmed,
he says, "When that process gets going, we
need to participate in it."
While it is difficult to predict what di-

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