Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission

July 2009 

As I write this column, Congress is a day away from the planned start of the August recess.  Both the House and the Senate won’t meet again until after Labor Day.  While initial plans called for both the House and the Senate to have passed climate change and healthcare legislation by the start of the recess, this task proved to be too difficult.  As Compact Comments goes to “print," it appears that the only one of these bills that will have been passed by recess will be the Waxman-Markey climate change bill (HR 2454) in the House.  That bill, otherwise known as the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009," was passed by the House on June 26.  Since then, healthcare legislation has moved onto the front burners with the President and House and Senate leadership only this week conceding that the healthcare deadline would also not be met.  Notwithstanding this, Congressman Waxman plans to have the House Energy and Commerce Committee work into the wee hours Friday (July 31) if necessary to report a healthcare bill out of his committee before recess.  That feat, and it will be a feat if liberals and Blue Dogs finally come to agreement on a bill, will only set up a process whereby the Energy and Commerce Committee healthcare bill will be merged with healthcare bills already reported out of the House Ways and Means and the House Education Committees.   It will be a busy autumn.

As this is an energy-focused column, we’ve probably said all we need to healthcare.  Concerning energy, as noted above, the House did pass a climate change bill.  The vote was 219-212, and, as the vote total would suggest, it was not “bipartisan”.  It took a lot of work for the Democratic majority to keep their members in line to secure a victory.  Come fall, the action will move to the Senate.  There, Senator Reid has apparently set a Sept. 18 deadline for the six Senate committees with jurisdiction over the bill to complete their work.  The ultimate goal of the President and House and Senate leadership is apparently to have a final climate change bill signed into law by December when United Nations climate change talks commence in Denmark.  

The Senate Committee with perhaps the biggest role to play in crafting the Senate climate change bill will be the Environment and Public Works Committee under Senator Boxer.  She has indicated that the bill likely to be reported out of her committee will look a lot like the House-passed bill.  Another Senate Committee with a major role to play in the climate change bill will be the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.   Indeed, they have already reported a bill out of the committee, S. 1462, that is likely to be the energy component of the Senate climate bill.  The bipartisan bill, otherwise known as the “American Clean Energy Leadership Act of 2009," was reported out of the committee on July 16.  More information on the bill can be found at the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee website.  Of note is that the bill contains provisions that would open new areas of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and natural gas production as well as facilitate the expansion of natural gas pipelines.  It also extends the life of the pilot offices for permit processing for oil and gas development that had been set up in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPACT ’05).  There are two very good summaries of the bill available on the site linked above, one two pages and the other ten for those interested in additional detail. 

Finally, no summary of energy events on Capitol Hill would be complete these days without mention of hydraulic fracturing.  Unfortunately, the news isn’t particularly positive with the introduction in both the House and the Senate of bills to repeal the exemption for hydraulic fracturing that the IOGCC worked so hard to get included in EPACT ’05.  The House Bill is HR 2766 and the Senate Bill is S. 1215.  They are both called the “Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals (FRAC) Act”.  Sponsored by Representative DeGette from Colorado in the House and Senator Casey of Pennsylvania in the Senate, the bills in addition to repealing Section 322 of EPACT ’05, would also require discloser of “the chemical constituents (but not the proprietary chemical formulas) used in the fracturing process.”   These bills were introduced within days of a hearing held on June 4, 2009, by the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources of the House Committee on Natural Resources.  The subject of the hearing was “Unconventional Fuels, Part I: Shale Gas Potential” at which our own Lynn Helms of North Dakota testified.  An audio recording of the hearing as well as a copy of all of the testimony presented, including Lynn Helms’ can be found at the Subcommittee website.