White House Launches Sweeping Review of Energy Policies

Pres­id­ent Obama has set in mo­tion long-stand­ing plans to carry out a wide-ran­ging ini­ti­at­ive to sur­vey the Amer­ic­an en­ergy land­scape and en­sure that do­mest­ic en­ergy-se­cur­ity ob­ject­ives align with cur­rent en­ergy policy.

The pres­id­ent signed a memor­andum on Thursday form­ally launch­ing the Quad­ren­ni­al En­ergy Re­view, a sur­vey of U.S. en­ergy pro­duc­tion, in­fra­struc­ture, and trans­port set to be com­pleted by an in­ter­agency task force. The task force will be led by high-rank­ing of­fi­cials from the White House Do­mest­ic Policy Coun­cil and the Of­fice of Sci­ence and Tech­no­logy Policy. The De­part­ment of En­ergy will play a key role in sup­port­ing the task force’s work.

The pres­id­ent first out­lined his plans to cre­ate a QER in a speech de­livered at Geor­getown Uni­versity last June, when he un­veiled his cli­mate ac­tion plan, high­light­ing en­ergy and en­vir­on­ment policy pri­or­it­ies for his second-term agenda.

The first QER, to be com­pleted in one year, will identi­fy ways the ad­min­is­tra­tion can im­prove in­fra­struc­ture and mit­ig­ate risks in­volved in en­ergy trans­port and de­liv­ery, an is­sue that has taken on in­creas­ing sig­ni­fic­ance in the wake of sev­er­al re­cent ac­ci­dents in­volving trains car­ry­ing crude oil. The re­port will also make re­com­mend­a­tions for elec­tric-grid mod­ern­iz­a­tion and im­prove­ments to the vast net­work of pipelines used to trans­port oil and nat­ur­al gas across the coun­try.

Ex­ec­ut­ive-branch of­fi­cials her­al­ded the an­nounce­ment as a first step to­wards cre­at­ing a blue­print for strength­en­ing do­mest­ic en­ergy pro­duc­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to a White House blog post au­thored by John Hold­ren, dir­ect­or of the White House Of­fice of Sci­ence and Tech­no­logy Policy; Cecil­ia Mun­oz, dir­ect­or of the White House Do­mest­ic Policy Coun­cil; and En­ergy Sec­ret­ary Ern­est Mon­iz: “Over four years, suc­cess­ive in­stall­ments of the QER will provide a com­pre­hens­ive set of re­com­mend­a­tions on how best to trans­form Amer­ica’s en­ergy pro­duc­tion, de­liv­ery, and con­sump­tion sys­tems to meet the chal­lenges of the 21st cen­tury. The QER will identi­fy im­port­ant op­por­tun­it­ies to mod­ern­ize, ex­pand, re­place, or trans­form our en­ergy in­fra­struc­ture sys­tem so that it bet­ter ac­com­mod­ates changes in en­ergy sup­ply, in­teg­rates cut­ting-edge in­form­a­tion and se­cur­ity tech­no­lo­gies, and meets in­creas­ing de­mand for new con­sumer ser­vices.”