Whether a debate in Congress this year over policies regarding offshore natural gas and oil exploration and production is ultimately effective  at increasing our energy security may depend on whether amendments to a little-noticed environmental statute — the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA) — are considered.  For those whose lives are too full to spend time wading through the U.S. Code, the short explanation is that CZMA contains a mechanism for the Commerce Department to resolve conflicts when a state or group of states object to a federally-approved project on grounds that the project would conflict with state coastal management plans.

The importance of the CZMA was highlighted this week when, as reported today in The Energy Daily, the Commerce Department upheld the State of New York’s objections (joined by Connecticut) to a proposal from Broadwater Energy LLC to build and operate a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Long Island Sound.  Readers may recall that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission unanimously approved the project more than a year ago.

 A key to the decision is a CZMA goal that industrial facilities should be located in areas where similar industrial activity already exists.  While that principle seems intuitively attractive on one level, it also conflicts with the goal of a resilient, robust and distributed energy system.  Many energy security experts bemoan the fact that too much of our key energy infrastructure is densely located in areas prone to hurricanes.  At the same time, emerging cyber and conventional terrorist threats argue against concentrating key assets in small geographic areas, regardless of their climatic histories. 

And of course a key intergenerational equity argument against this CZMA bias is that it allows siting decisions made decades ago, when energy was truly cheap and abundant, to constrain our ability to access valuable national resources in a time of scarcity and in a world where hostile actors control far too much of the world’s valuable hydrocarbons.

Ironically, Commerce did not agree with Connecticut’s argument against the project.  The state argued that future LNG supplies from other projects may be sufficient to satisfy regional demands, noting that “projected capacity from these other proposed facilities is highly speculative.”

“Highly speculative” is perhaps an understatement.  As long as environmental laws designed to clean up and prevent pollution can be used to block energy projects simply because they’ve not been built there before, new energy production outside the Gulf of Mexico is little more than a fantasy.  Whether that’s in the national interest should be a matter of congressional debate.