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Alaska waits for energy bill Senate vote may be delayed into April, and time could run short Larry Persily Petroleum News Government Affairs Editor
It likely will be the end of March at the earliest before the full Senate takes up its lower-cost version of the energy bill, and the vote could be delayed into April.
But it had better happen before Congress goes on its Easter break, if Alaska is to get a chance at winning passage of key federal incentives for construction of a North Slope natural gas pipeline, said a spokesman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.
It’s simply a matter of matching presidential and partisan politics to the calendar, said Murkowski aide Chuck Kleeschulte.
And regardless of when the measure finally reaches the full Senate for a vote, it will not include the commodity-risk, or price-support, provision inserted into the bill last month at the committee level. The provision would have granted federal corporate income tax credits to North Slope producers to protect them if natural gas ever drops below $1.35 per thousand cubic feet at the wellhead.
“It’s coming out. It’s not going to stay in the bill,” said an aide to Senate Energy Chair Pete Domenici, R-N.M. No controversy over other gas line provisions There appears no controversy over the other Alaska gas incentives in the bill, including a federal loan guarantee for up to 80 percent of the project cost, accelerated depreciation, tax credits for the North Slope gas treatment plant and expedited permitting.
The Senate will be busy the entire week of March 8 debating the annual budget resolution and its anticipated multitude of amendments. Then the Senate goes on break the next week, coinciding with St. Patrick’s Day but not really to celebrate the Irish, Kleeschulte said. Because Easter comes late this year — April 11 — and because Congress doesn’t want to wait that long for its usual two-week vacation, lawmakers will take one week in March and one week at Easter, he said.
Congress is scheduled to go back to work March 22. “The energy bill can’t come to the floor before then,” Kleeschulte said.
Yet, even that week is already looking crowded with other controversial work, likely to push back the energy bill debate another week. The Senate is scheduled the week of March 22 to consider the House-approved measure that would for the first time under federal law give victim’s rights to a fetus. Senators to take up fetus’ rights debate The Unborn Victims of Violence Act, adopted on a 254-163 vote Feb. 26, says federal law enforcement authorities could charge suspects with two crimes for injuring or killing a pregnant woman and her fetus. Conservative groups, and the president, are pushing the bill, which is drawing opposition from others who say it would confer new rights on fetuses and undermine abortion rights.
After that contentious political battle, the Senate calendar looks open for an energy bill vote in early April.
“If they’re going to do an energy bill, they’ve got to do it before Easter,” Kleeschulte said. After that, time and politics will work against its passage, he said.
Because the Senate bill is different from the higher-cost version the House passed in November, the measure will need to return to the House and possibly another conference committee to work out the differences. Allowing enough time for that work, and figuring in the annual congressional break for Memorial Day, energy bill proponents are watching the calendar. July could be deadline for passage Kleeschulte said he doubts the bill will have much of a chance of passage if it isn’t approved by both chambers before July, when political party conventions and presidential politics will start consuming most everyone’s attention.
And there are other problems, too, said John Katz, director of Alaska’s office in Washington, D.C.
“Clearly, even the slimmed-down version is going to be in for a little more surgery,” Katz said. Although the Senate version, put together in private by the Republican leaders of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and unveiled Feb. 10, is about half the cost of the version that failed in the Senate last November, it is still too rich for the president and some senators. Bill’s cost still an issue “We’ve warned Congress about making the bill too expensive,” U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said last month of the Senate committee version with an estimated price tag of $14 billion to $16 billion in tax credits and appropriations. “We favor a less expensive bill.”
Perhaps there is some comfort in the fact that although Abraham criticized the bill’s cost he didn’t use “the veto word,” as the president has done in other spending debates, Katz said.
And there is still the political problem between the House Republican leadership, which wants the final bill to include a liability waiver for manufacturers of the gasoline additive methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE, and the latest Senate committee version of the bill, which does not include the lawsuit-blocking waiver.
Internal Republican disputes aside, Senate Democratic Minority Leader Tom Daschle said he believes there are enough votes in the Senate to pass the measure, which favors the South Dakota senator’s farm constituency with federal incentives to double the use of corn-based ethanol fuels.
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