Four roadblocks to Romney’s energy plan

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/80051.html?hp=l5

Energy experts say Mitt Romney’s goal to achieve North American energy independence by 2020 would be almost impossible to reach — and anyway, there’s not much in what the Republican candidate laid out Thursday that counts as a concrete plan.

Speaking in the energy production hotbed of southern New Mexico, Romney outlined goals that rely heavily on industry calls to remove federal oversight while approving the Keystone XL pipeline and opening up large swaths of U.S. coastline and public lands to more oil and natural gas drilling.

Terry Tamminen, an environmental adviser to former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, doesn’t agree with Romney’s reliance on oil.

“Energy independence is not a pipe dream,” he wrote in an email. “That said, no president or candidate for the office has ever laid out a credible plan to achieve it. A real plan doesn’t rely on fuels that will run out in a few decades, nor does it impose massive hidden taxes that make us very dependent in other ways.”

Nursing the oil addiction

Asked if the United States could ever reach energy independence, Alex Flint, a nuclear energy industry official and former top Senate GOP aide, replied that such a plan wouldn’t rely so heavily on oil.

“It’s the year when batteries — or some other technology I cannot imagine — make the transportation sector essentially petroleum free,” said Flint, a senior vice president at the Nuclear Energy Institute and a former Republican staff director for the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “I have no idea if or when that is. Further, even if we only need a bit of petroleum in some far-off year, would we really care where we got it?”

U.S. reliance on imported petroleum has dropped dramatically in the past few years, the byproduct of the financial crisis, efficiency improvements, changes in consumer behaviors and increases in domestic production, including the shale gas boom. According to the EIA, net petroleum imports accounted for about 45 percent of U.S. supply last year, down from a 2005 peak of more than 60 percent.

According to EIA projections, the United States will get between 22 percent to 51 percent of its oil from new imports in 2035, depending on oil prices.

Offshore problems would persist

The Romney energy agenda also relies on a hard dive into more offshore leasing, starting with Virginia and the Carolinas and expanding into the Gulf of Mexico and other parts of the Atlantic seaboard.

Here, the Republican complains that the Obama administration “has stifled efforts at exploration entirely” outside the Gulf through the drilling moratorium it imposed after the BP oil spill.

But Romney’s efforts to encourage a sweeping expansion of U.S. offshore oil production would expose him to the same set of challenges faced by Obama, who has been president amid record increases in domestic oil and gas production despite fallout from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster.

Jay Hakes, a former Clinton-era director of the Energy Information Administration, noted that oil companies like Shell are on their way to getting the green light from the Obama administration to drill offshore in Alaska despite significant opposition from environmentalists. If the energy industry pushes harder, he predicts trouble.

Drilling plan a 'nonstarter'

Romney’s plan would give states pretty much carte blanche to impose their existing permitting and regulatory powers when it comes to drilling on federal lands. “Maximum flexibility to ascertain what is most appropriate,” the campaign said in a 21-page white paper detailing its plan, noting that it would speed up a process that can take just shy of a year under current federal policies.

While giving states greater control over drilling on federal lands is an idea long advocated by conservative lawmakers, mainly from the West, it’s also sure to run into a groundswell of opposition from Democrats, including the kinds of moderates Romney would need to build a working coalition.

The rest of North America doesn’t need to cooperate

Romney’s plan calls for North American energy independence, but that relies on two countries he wouldn’t have authority over even if elected.

Other parts of the Romney energy plan are largely retreads that seem unlikely to help him get to his 2020 goal, including a call for updated seismic assessments of the nation’s onshore and offshore resources. Romney said the information is needed to know what potential domestic sources can still be tapped. But Bush signed energy legislation in 2005 requiring exactly this kind of updated inventory — on everything from oil to natural gas to coal.