Keystone XL Pipeline Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I stand today to encourage my colleagues to support my amendment No. 71. This amendment would solve a problem that has severely hamstrung oil and gas development on Federal lands, a problem that is particularly severe in the Western United States and that involves excessive delays in the issuing of permits by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Federal law requires the BLM to approve or deny these permits within 30 days. They have 30 days to go one way or the other. But according to a report issued last year by the inspector general within the U.S. Department of Interior, BLM took an average of 228 days to approve each drilling permit in 2012--228 days. That is 7 1/2 months. That is a lot longer than the 30 days under Federal law. In Moab and in Salt Lake City, UT, the average processing delay is 220 days. In Price, UT, the backlog is around 250 days. It doesn't have to take this long. In fact, to explain why, let's look at how States handle it.
State governments, by comparison, process these same permits in 80 days or less.
Approval of these permits is further complicated by endless environmental reviews, reviews that sometimes can take years upon years. The result of all this redtape is a serious backlog of about 3,500 permits.
My amendment would address this problem in a few ways. First, it would require BLM to issue a permit within 60 days of receiving an application. If the permit is denied, the BLM would be required to specify the reasons for its decision to deny the permit and to allow the applicant thereafter to address any issues.
The amendment would also address delays stemming from reviews under the Endangered Species Act and under the National Environmental Policy Act. Reviews under these statutes are required to be completed within 180 days. To provide companies with certainty and to hold BLM accountable, if either of these deadlines is not met, the applications would be deemed approved.
Significantly, there are currently 113 million acres of Federal land open and accessible for oil and gas development. Much of this Federal land contains abundant domestic energy resources. In Utah alone we have hundreds of acres available for drilling, acres that are currently being held up by bureaucratic delays. My amendment would ensure that Utah and other States in the West that are dominated by Federal land can access the energy, the vast wealth that lies within their borders, and provide the United States with a reliable source of domestic energy production.
Look, our security--our energy security and our national security, more broadly--depends ultimately on our ability to produce energy. I understand that fuel prices right now are down relative to what they have been. We cannot get too secure in this. We cannot assume it is always going to be the case. Certainly, when the Federal Government insists on owning this much land--roughly one-third of the land in the United States as a whole, roughly two-thirds of the land in my State of Utah--if we are going to own this much land within the Federal Government, we should be using the resources within it.
We need to make sure we are using that land to shore up our energy independence. The less energy independent we are in this country, the more dependent we become on other countries that are producing their energy, that are using their natural resources--countries such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and other countries where there are a lot of people growing wealthy off of our petrodollars and where many of those same people are using our own petrodollars to fund acts of terrorism against us, countries that are often hostile to our interests.
We need to do this because it makes sense economically and we need to do this because it makes sense from a national security standpoint as well. But in order for any of this to work, we have to have procedures in place to make sure that those people who choose to go out and want to develop land--want to develop Federal land that has already been identified as suitable for oil and gas production within Federal lands--that they have some modicum of due process, that they have some ability to predict what the procedural outcome is going to be, what set of procedures they will have to follow and what kind of timeline they will be facing as they approach this often lengthy process.
We do need to be careful. We do need to be sensitive and we need to make sure we are developing our natural resources in a way that respects our environment and doesn't endanger our health or that of our Federal land, but this can be done in a way that doesn't have to result in open-ended and completely unforeseeable delays.
For this reason I strongly encourage my colleagues to support this amendment, amendment No. 71, with the understanding that as they do so, they will be shoring up America's energy independence, and with it, America's national security.
Thank you, Mr. President.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I stand to urge my colleagues to support this amendment. The purpose of this amendment is to expedite the process by which the Bureau of Land Management processes applications for a permit for drilling on Federal land. We all know that drilling and the production of oil and natural gas in our country on Federal lands is an essential activity for our energy security and therefore for our national security.
The fact is that although these applications are supposed to be handled in an expedited manner, they are not. The average right now for them to be processed is about 7 1/2 months. That is too long. We need a simple up-or-down ruling by the Bureau of Land Management, especially given the fact that these lands, once they get to this stage, have already been deemed by the Bureau of Land Management as suitable for oil and gas leasing. I therefore urge each of my colleagues to support this amendment and thereby secure our energy security.
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