Mar 1, 2023 4 min read

Just this past November, President Joe Biden celebrated the one-year anniversary of his Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and touted the once-in-a-generation improvements for highway, bridge, rail, electric transmission and other projects that the law will fund – all paid for with taxpayer dollars.

Yet, left unaddressed and conspicuously absent from the president’s focus on infrastructure is the one asset that promises to secure our nation, reignite manufacturing, improve public safety and unleash hundreds of thousands of job opportunities for our tradesmen and women: pipelines.

And unlike the president’s signature piece of legislation, pipelines would be paid for not by taxpayer dollars, but private investment. We just need the federal government, and the state, to cut the bureaucratic red tape and get out of the way.

Thanks in great part to the abundance of energy resources, including natural gas and natural gas liquids, found right here in Pennsylvania, we have an unprecedented opportunity to build our economy and reduce our dependency on foreign nations for the goods and products that are essential to our daily lives.

Make no mistake: we all use these products every day. From the seemingly mundane – our ever-present cell phones and tablets, clothing, food packaging and much more – to life-saving medical devices, medications, natural gas and associated liquids are ingrained in our economy and quality of life.

The real question is whether we are going to be a country that makes things here or lets other nations make them while we export our dollars and economic and national security overseas.

These products need to be collected, processed and moved from their point of production to their point of downstream use. Pipelines are essential to doing so. And, they are the safest way we can do so. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, pipelines are our safest mode of moving products, with a 99.999% rate of success without incident.

The importance of pipelines is highlighted now more than ever, given that in the last three weeks, we have witnessed three train derailments. One of them occurred in Ohio, just miles outside of Pennsylvania’s border.

Yet, opposition to pipeline buildout from some in our state and federal governments threatens to derail the opportunity before us. We have seen a precipitous decline in the number of approved pipeline projects from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, while here in Pennsylvania, basic permits to literally move a few feet of earth can take up to 200 days or more for approval. In 2017, we saw enough new pipeline deployment in the U.S. to move more than 30 BCF (billion cubic feet) of natural gas a day; by 2021, this had dropped to less than five BCF. Meanwhile, at least eight major pipeline projects – which had invested $50 billion and a combined 64 years of efforts to obtain permits – were canceled due to inefficient permitting timelines, ever-changing regulatory criteria and incessant NIMBYism. This translates into tens of billions of private capital investment, and tens of thousands of jobs, never to be realized.

We need leaders who match their rhetoric for the American worker with tangible action: predictable permitting timelines, consistent regulatory standards and agency leadership that doesn’t hijack the authority entrusted to their office as an opportunity to advance their woke personal agendas.

President Biden and Gov. Josh Shapiro have the opportunity to change this. They must prioritize the interests of their constituents to be secure in our energy and economic future, to start manufacturing things here again and to unleash the potential of our great state and nation.

Sen. Camera Bartolotta represents the 46th Senatorial District, covering all of Greene and Washington counties and parts of Beaver County.