A federal judge earlier this month ordered the Dakota Access pipeline to shut down because it was improperly granted a key environmental permit without producing the review NEPA required.
Photo: Nati Harnik/Associated PressPresident Trump plans to announce Wednesday that his administration has completed its update to the National Environmental Policy Act, including changes that will mandate deadlines for completing environmental reviews.
The new rules would require full environmental impact statements to be completed within two years. Less comprehensive environmental assessments would have to be concluded within one year. It is widely anticipated to hew to a proposal the administration made in January.
The measures, which are expected to be published in the Federal Register on Thursday and go into effect in 60 days, are supported by business groups and trade unions who say the environmental review process has been distorted to become a tool to endlessly delay needed highways, pipelines and other infrastructure projects.
The changes are opposed by environmentalists who say the reviews serve as a bulwark against climate change and help protect poor and minority communities that typically lack the resources to defend their interests from development that could harm their neighborhoods.
Mr. Trump is scheduled to make his announcement at a late-afternoon visit to United Parcel Service Inc.’s Hapeville Airport Hub in Atlanta. That shipping facility and others are expected to benefit from a planned commercial vehicle lane project on Interstate 75, which is the type of project that the administration says will benefit from the revisions to NEPA.
Environmental reviews now take longer than four years on average—seven for highways, according to the administration. It has previously estimated a national backlog of infrastructure projects at nearly $1 trillion.
NEPA, enacted in 1970, gave environmentalists and conservationists a voice in planning, allowing them to sue if they believed developers weren’t properly following the law. Planners had to issue environmental-impact statements for their most significant projects detailing how they would alter surroundings and alternatives that could mitigate damage.
Democrats and environmental groups say the changes could limit legal rights for people who file comments late in the environmental review process. They are also concerned climate change may get less scrutiny. January’s proposal said most stringent reviews wouldn’t have to address effects “remote in time, geographically remote, or the result of a lengthy causal chain.”
“This is the height of stupidity, the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand like an ostrich—and then hoping the water doesn’t rise,” said Samantha Gross, a fellow specializing in climate and energy at the Brookings Institution.
Business lobbyists who support the changes say a much larger overhaul is still necessary to break the gridlock.
“NEPA is just a small component of that,” said Ben Norris, senior counsel at the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s largest trade group. “The foot shouldn’t come off the gas. There’s a lot more to do here.”
Pipelines are likely to benefit, experts said, from one of the new policy’s biggest changes as outlined in the proposal, excluding more projects from the most stringent reviews. It would apply to anything that gets no or little federal funding. Energy companies are also a fan of a move to allow reviewers to consider pre-existing data and studies, so all reviews aren’t starting totally from scratch.
Pipeline projects have come under special attack from environmentalists, who see their permitting process as a weak point in slowing oil-and-gas development and the industry’s greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change. NEPA has often been central to their fight, including in a wave of recent setbacks for pipeline developers.
A federal judge earlier this month ordered the Dakota Access pipeline—already operational for three years—to shut down because it was improperly granted a key environmental permit without producing the review NEPA required.
Duke Energy Corp. and Dominion Energy Inc. canceled the Atlantic Coast Pipeline project amid years of permit delays and opposition to new fossil-fuel projects. They made that decision despite winning a Supreme Court decision about a permit to cross the Appalachian Trail.
The companies cited uncertainty over infrastructure permitting. During the six-year wait, Virginia also passed a law that would require all Dominion’s gas-fired power plants to capture their emissions or close by 2045.
Industry lobbyists and allies said the Atlantic Coast project’s failure shows how complex the permitting problem is. And for some it sparked frustration that the administration hadn’t taken more dramatic steps earlier to update federal permitting and took 3½ years to accomplish just a preliminary overhaul.
“As a practical matter, I don’t think it means much of anything,” Mike McKenna, an industry lobbyist who led the transition team for Mr. Trump on energy, said of the Trump proposal. “It’s been totally overtaken by events.”
Industry officials did credit Mr. Trump for completing a NEPA overhaul, something other presidents of both parties have talked about but failed to do for decades. And they noted that benefits likely would extend beyond fossil fuel to emissions-free electricity from wind and hydropower, too. Trade groups from those industries have been supportive of the plan.
“If we want to be able to build the big things we need to build and build them quickly in order to address the climate challenge, we have to address this broken permitting process,” said Marty Durbin who leads the energy arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“This isn’t about saying how do we get a green light for every project that’s proposed,“ Mr. Durbin said. “This is just about how do we get a yes or no.”
Write to Timothy Puko at tim.puko@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
The measures are expected to go into effect in 60 days. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said they would go into effect immediately.
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