In the United States, President Barack Obama has ordered a broad review of the country’s energy infrastructure, noting that factors such as rising demand and climate change have put increased pressure on the aging system.
In a statement announcing the launch of a Quadrennial Energy Review, the White House said an associated task force would spend the next year studying the systems required for “transporting, transmitting, and delivering energy.”
Reuters Newsagency reports the first report, with recommendations, would be due January 31, 2015.
“Our current infrastructure is increasingly challenged by transformations in energy supply, markets, and patterns of end use; issues of aging and capacity; impacts of climate change; and cyber and physical threats,” said the president’s memo establishing the review.
“Any vulnerability in this infrastructure may be exacerbated by the increasing interdependencies of energy systems with water, telecommunications, transportation, and emergency response systems.”
The task force report would serve as a “roadmap” to address such challenges, the memo said.
Plans for the Quadrennial Energy Review, known as a QER, have been underway for months.
A boom in US shale oil and natural gas production has transformed global energy markets.
As a result the administration must deal with issues including pipelines, hydraulic fraturing and transport of crude oil by rail.
There have also been calls to allow exports of US crude oil.
The White House noted that domestic oil production has grown more than 50 per cent since President Obama took office in 2009 and natural gas production was at its highest-ever levels.
These conditions are seriously testing aging US infrastructure.
Reuters reports some politicians, including Lisa Murkowski of oil-rich Alaska, the top Republican on the Senate Energy Committee, are pressing the government to end a decades-old ban on exporting US crude oil.
Energy experts welcomed the move as the idea of a QER has been in discussion for years.
It was one of the recommendations made last March by the president’s high-profile Council of Advisors on Science and Technology for his second-term climate strategy.
Mr Obama also called for the QER in a June speech unveiling his climate change action plan.
The review would be similar to the energy department’s ongoing Quadrennial Technology Review, which assesses the agency’s technology policies.
It also resembles the Defence Department’s Quadrennial Defence Review, which assesses current threats, challenges and capabilities to better address future conflicts.
David Pumphrey, a former deputy assistant secretary for international energy cooperation at the Department of Energy, said the January 2015 deadline was aggressive given the amount of work required to bring the involved agencies together.
He said it was possible that big policy decisions, such as the issue of US oil exports, would be timed so as not to pre-empt the result
One Response
How about they review Obama’s wasting of BILLIONS in Environmental funding on BOGUS Green/Solar companies?
He had a former MONSANTO executive as his head of Agriculture! – he is a total fraud, as was George Bush and doesn’t care one iota about the environment…