Congress will embark next week on helping the fracking industry win a drawn out-battle when the Senate holds a hearing on legislation that would relax export restrictions on liquid natural gas (LNG).
The Senate Energy Committee is set to discuss a bill that would force the Secretary of Energy to make final decisions on LNG export permits 45 days after environmental reviews are concluded.
Introduced by committee Republican member John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and co-sponsored by three other Republicans and four Democrats–including two opponents of the Keystone XL Pipeline–the measure looks likely to pass.
The panel that will testify on Thursday before the Energy Committee is going to be filled by mostly corporate think tank witnesses, indicating that Democrats, on the whole, are not looking to even nominally oppose the measure.
If it passes, American natural gas producers will be more easily able to export fuel to countries that the US does not have free trade agreements with. Companies don’t need permits to export LNG to countries that have agreed to free trade deals with Washington.
The change in law could have detrimental affects on Americans who don’t directly benefit from gas revenues. Increased world demand for natural gas from the US could see Americans left with higher bills and American landscapes more pockmarked with invasive extraction apparatuses.
Last year, as Congress considered legislation that would have expedited the export permit approval process, Public Citizen energy expert Tyson Slocum told Cole Stangler of In These Times that the bill had “nothing to do with benefiting consumers.”
“It has everything to do with increasing the financial returns and profits of entities directly involved in domestic fracking,” he said.
In an email sent Friday, Public Citizen added that “prioritizing LNG exports would help the fracking industry at the expense of the rest of the economy.”
When Congress considered fast-tracking the LNG export permit approval process last year, it used the conflict in Ukraine as a means of pushing the initiative. As Stangler pointed out, the industry had been lobbying to advance exports before the fighting broke out between Kiev and Russian-backed separatist movements. The fracking boom, he wrote, had caused “overproduction and oversupply.”
The measure passed the House with the support of dozens of Democrats. While it was not taken up by the Senate, President Obama did not threaten to veto the bill, The Wall Street Journal noted.
