Washington – Senate passage of a massive energy bill this week, two months after the House approved a much different version, has set the stage for an intense congressional debate on energy that could alter the West’s environmental landscape.
The battle will determine whether the oil and gas industry gets a number of exemptions from environmental regulations to spur exploration and how closely the federal government will monitor drilling on the West’s vast public lands.
“The upshot of the House bill will be to make oil and gas the dominant use of public lands,” said Dave Alberswerth of the Wilderness Society.
The House version puts “energy development on par with other (public land) uses,” said Lee Fuller of the Independent Petroleum Association of America. “I don’t think the Senate bill moves as directly on those issues.”
The Senate version of the bill, approved Tuesday, emphasizes incentives for conservation and renewable energy. The House passed a more industry-oriented energy bill in April focused on aggressively increasing domestic production.
Now, a joint House-Senate conference committee will be charged with hammering out the differences.
“I think this conference is more important than the actions of either body so far,” said Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo.
Conferees representing the two houses of Congress have not yet been named, but no Coloradans are likely to be among them. Colorado’s members on the relevant committees have too little seniority.
The negotiations over the energy bill come as gasoline prices are soaring and the West is already seeing a surge in drilling on public lands.
More than 6,000 oil and gas wells were approved on public lands last year, the Bureau of Land Management reported – three times the number of approvals in 1996. Companies drilled 3,696 oil and gas wells in 2004, most of them in Rocky Mountain states such as Colorado and Wyoming. That’s more than twice the 1,410 drilled in 1996.
The political stakes are high. In the last election, the oil and gas industry gave $25 million to candidates for federal office, 80 percent to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Among the largest recipients were Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas ($55,900); House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas ($22,500); House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas ($24,250); and Rep. Bob Beauprez, R-Colo. ($12,200).
Nationally, much of the energy-bill debate has focused on global warming, coastal drilling and MTBE, a fuel additive that can pollute groundwater. There has also been controversy over the issue of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The House version of the bill would open the Alaska refuge to drilling, but the Senate measure would not.
There has been less discussion about the huge differences in how the two bills treat oil and gas development in the West.
The House bill contains a host of regulatory exemptions and tax breaks for oil and gas companies. It would order federal officials to speed up development of massive oil-shale reserves in Colorado.
The Senate took more input from Democrats and environmentalists, and its bill has few such regulatory exemptions. The Senate package is aimed at boosting renewable energy.
Industry representatives say the House bill restores balance to public lands, where they say energy production has been suppressed by environmental regulations and bureaucratic inertia.
Environmentalists grudgingly support the Senate version, while industry prefers the House version.
“With the Senate bill, you have the status quo, which is Bush administration policy, but at least you don’t have that written into the law,” said Alberswerth, the Wilderness Society spokesman.
It’s not clear what approach the conference committee will take. But passage of the bill is not likely to hinge on Western- focused issues such as natural- gas production.
“It’s those huge issues like MTBE or (the Arctic refuge) that have potential to derail the bill,” said Sen. Ken Salazar, a Colorado Democrat on the Senate energy committee.
The last energy bill, which fell apart in a dispute over MTBE, contained many of the pro-industry regulatory changes included in the House bill. But Senate Democrats were largely excluded from those discussions. This year, however, they’re being included.
Democrats believe the Senate has committed itself to “no environmental rollbacks” such as those contained in the House bill, said Bill Wicker, spokesman for Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, the top Democrat on the Senate energy committee.
But Republicans note that the Senate hasn’t voted down such environmental rollbacks; it just didn’t include them in the bill.
Staff writer Mike Soraghan can be reached at 202-662-8730 or msoraghan@denverpost.com.
