Heinrich Welcomes Committee Passage of Bipartisan Permitting Reform Legislation
Heinrich: Permitting legislation would lead to historic reduction in climate-warming emissions, build more transmission, make unprecedented investments in geothermal technologies
WASHINGTON — After voting to advance the Energy Permitting Reform Act 0f 2024 out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) delivered remarks welcoming the passage of the legislation. Heinrich highlighted the bill’s potential to help America dramatically reduce harmful emissions through its investments that will build more electric transmission lines, invest in emerging clean energy technologies like next-generation geothermal, and remove obstacles that have delayed the build out of transformative clean energy projects.
In his statement after today’s vote, Heinrich commented on the bill’s potential for historic reductions in climate-warming emissions: “The reductions in emissions, because of the transmission and geothermal portions of this legislation, are going to reduce emissions by two to three billion – not million with an M, billion with a B – metric tons of co2.”
Heinrich continued, “This puts us on a much faster path to addressing the things that are causing drought and forest fires and all kinds of stress across the country, and especially in the West.”
The Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 includes a number of provisions that Heinrich has championed, including his interregional transmission planning bill, provisions from his permitting bill, the FASTER Act, and his bipartisan Geothermal Energy Optimization (GEO) Act, which puts geothermal projects on an equal footing with oil and gas projects on public land and will help accelerate the adoption of geothermal energy nationwide.
Heinrich’s full remarks as delivered in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee are below:
This was a carefully crafted bipartisan, balanced bill. All of us have things we love about it. And we also have a few things that we're not crazy about. But that's how legislation works.
In New Mexico, for a little context, we're currently building a major regional transmission line 550 miles long, crossing Arizona and New Mexico. It's a $20 billion impact to the economy. But it took us 17 years to get there.
We have to be able to get to yes, or to get to no, in a lot shorter time frame if we're going to address the climate crisis that Senator Padilla brought up.
And America frankly needs to be able to build big things.
Again, there are some things in this that will increase emissions. The oil and gas provisions will likely increase emissions on a scale of less than 160 million tons of Co2.**
It's good to put that in perspective because the reductions in emissions, because of the [investments in] transmission and geothermal and other portions of this are going to reduce emissions by 2 to 3 billion - not million with an M, billion with a B - metric tons of CO2.
This puts us on a much faster path to addressing the things that are causing drought and forest fires and all kinds of stress across the country — especially in the West.
I also want to say how much I appreciate Senator Murkowski’s willingness and patience because some of these are common sense provisions.
And we can nail down the details and should nail down the details on things like run-of-the-river hydro.
I want to make sure that the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management are the agencies that manage the land around those rivers and that they're involved in that FERC process. I think we can get there on that.
I think small hydro maintenance is another area where FERC has a lot of things to do. They don't need to be approving amendments for very minor maintenance.
I look forward to working with you on that.
And thank you for your advocacy, Senator Murkowski.
**"160 million metric tons of CO2" refers to the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the U.S. share of oil and gas consumption under a modeled scenario with high levels of sustained federal onshore oil and gas leasing through 2050. The cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions from increased oil and gas leasing through 2050 is about 1 billion metric tons when exports are considered. The study indicated that emissions resulting from the actual provisions in the Energy Permitting Reform Act would likely be significantly less.
Background:
Heinrich has long led efforts to improve and expand the capacity of our nation’s transmission infrastructure, which is urgently needed for reliability, affordability, and clean electricity.
In this Congress, Heinrich is leading major legislation to strengthen electric reliability by improving the way that we permit, plan, and pay for transmission infrastructure — dubbing these bills as the “three Ps of transmission.” Many of the key components in Heinrich’s transmission bills were included in the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024.
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