By Rich Heidorn Jr.

WASHINGTON — FERC, which faces monthly protests by global warming activists for approving natural gas pipelines and LNG terminals, was summoned to Capitol Hill last week to answer Republican criticism that it commission isn’t clearing infrastructure permits fast enough.

It fell not on Chairman Norman Bay but on the panel’s lone Republican, Tony Clark, to defend FERC’s record on natural gas before the House Energy and Power Subcommittee.

Clark said that the commission had completed 92% of all applications within 12 months for the last decade. But that percentage is bound to fall, he said, because of the crushing volume of pending applications.

Since August 2014, Clark said, pending applications have spiked from 1,000 miles of pipeline with a capacity of 24 BCF/d to 4,600 miles and 50 Bcf/d. “I think it is going to be very difficult to maintain that high average when you have this volume of [applications],” said Clark, now the senior Republican on the commission with the departure in October of Philip Moeller.

While Clark talked of infrastructure, Bay focused his prepared testimony on his priorities as chairman. Commissioner Cheryl LaFleur addressed reliability and competitive markets, while Commissioner Colette Honorable spoke about FERC’s role under the Clean Power Plan.

Oversight Ritual

Congressional oversight hearings are a ritual of Washington. Each member of the committee gets five minutes to ask questions. While many members use their time to make policy statements, the best questions have often been picked clean by the time those with less seniority get their turn.

Clark faced much the same dilemma after becoming the junior member of the commission in 2012. “I don’t have any questions,” he would often tell staff presenters at the monthly meetings with a sheepish smile. “But thank you for your report.”

But with the departures of Moeller, Jon Wellinghoff and John Norris, and the arrival of Bay and Honorable, Clark is now second in seniority only to LaFleur.

At the Nov. 19 commission meeting, he settled for the first time into what had been Moeller’s seat, to the left of Bay at the head of the semi-circular table. “I’ve never been accused of being to the left of anyone on this commission,” he said to laughter. He has become increasingly assertive in the last year, both at commission meetings and in speeches around the country. (See FERC’s Clark: Energy Markets Need Tweaks, not Overhaul.)

In their opening statements last Tuesday, Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Power Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) chided FERC over what Upton called “problems with the timeliness of FERC approvals.”

They also criticized the Clean Power Plan, with Whitfield saying he is concerned “that FERC is allowing itself to become a helpless bystander as EPA increasingly dominates the electricity sector and does so in ways that serve to exacerbate the very problems FERC is supposed to protect consumers against.”

In keeping with the bipartisan ethos that has governed FERC since at least the Pat Wood era, the commission has taken pains not to get embroiled in the partisan fight over climate change and the CPP.

“Thank you for your question, congressman,” the commissioners prefaced their responses to even the most uninformed or repetitive questions.

Clark’s even-handed responses left little policy daylight between himself and his Democratic colleagues.

‘Punitive’ Target for North Dakota

But things got personal when he talked about the impact of the CPP on his home state of North Dakota.

Between the draft and final rules, Clark said, the state’s emissions reduction target quadrupled from 11% to 45%.

This, he said, even though carbon emissions dropped 11% between 2005 and 2014 and even though the state is one of only a few meeting EPA’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

“Utilities during that timeframe built a significant amount of wind power, in part as a hedge against carbon regulatory risk,” said Clark, whose term expires in 2016 and is rumored to have interest in running for Congress himself. “Unfortunately, it turned out to be a hedge for which they will receive no credit. Additionally, the state’s coal fleet is still relatively young, and has thus incurred recent investments for environmental compliance.”

Clark said the state’s CPP target is “so punitive that I struggle to conceive of a way it can meet it in an affordable manner,” citing a state estimate that compliance through emissions trading could exceed $400 million annually. It is, he said, “a staggering figure for a state of less than 750,000 people.”