One of the major time-sinks in energy development isn't the location of resources; it isn't the development, or the transport, or the refining. It's the application and permitting processes, among the various levels of government and the many levels of bureaucracy within those levels. It's a major cost, as well, and that cost leaks down into the ultimate cost of energy, which means, into every corner, every aspect, every detail of our economy.
That's not an ideal situation, to say the least.
But now there's a possible tool that may help streamline that process: Artificial intelligence. Watt's Up With That's scribe Duncan Wood has some interesting thoughts on that.
The U.S. has spent the past decade reshaping global energy markets. It became the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. It emerged as a leading LNG exporter. It expanded renewable generation at record pace.
This is what energy dominance looks like in practice: abundant supply, export strength, technological leadership, and resilience across fuels. But sustaining that dominance now depends on something less visible than drilling rigs or export terminals. It depends on permitting speed.
The U.S. does not lack energy resources. It does not lack capital. It does not lack technological innovation. What increasingly constrains deployment across hydrocarbons, electricity, critical minerals and infrastructure is the time it takes to move projects from proposal to approval.
Artificial intelligence offers a way to change that; not by weakening environmental standards, but by modernizing the process used to apply them.
We can hope. Here in the Great Land, we see this process played out daily. While the Trump administration has done great work in fast-tracking things like the Ambler Mining Road and the Alaska Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) pipeline, it's still taking months longer than it should.
Could a properly programmed AI speed up the processing of what the various government agencies require in terms of environmental reviews? A better answer would be to reform the processes themselves, but many of those would take Congressional action. But how those reviews are done - that's largely up to the Executive branch, which carries them out.
Again, it's not just the resources themselves, but the infrastructure.
Getting things built is essential to achieving a modern and responsive energy system. Oil and gas production depends on pipelines, gathering systems, and export terminals. LNG exports depend on large-scale federal approvals. Offshore development requires environmental review and leasing coordination. Refining expansions require multi-layered regulatory signoff.
The electricity sector faces similar constraints. Rising power demand from advanced manufacturing, data centers, electrification, and industrial growth requires new generation and expanded transmission capacity. Yet transmission projects can take a decade or more from concept to completion.
Energy dominance is not simply about resource abundance. It is about the ability to build infrastructure at the speed of market demand. When permitting timelines stretch into multi-year review cycles, projects face higher financing costs, regulatory uncertainty, and litigation risk. Even economically viable projects can stall.
The infrastructure costs are already eye-popping, especially in a place like Alaska, where the distances a pipeline or road has to run are great, and much of the route is a howling wilderness, and often a swampy one at that. Anywhere we can seek to improve the process, to reduce the cost and the time delay, would help - not just the energy companies, but all of us.
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At least one person in Washington is giving this some thought, and as it happens, he's just the guy to see that done. In February, the Center for Strategic and International Studies had a discussion with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who, as it happens, has some experience in software development. Part of that discussion was on just this issue, the permitting lifecycle, and Secretary Burgum had some interesting insights as well.
So we said, what if we took one of these things and we don’t change anything at all – we don’t go to Congress, we don’t do whatever – we just – when it’s done – when this process is done, the next person starts immediately on it? And we did an EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) in 12 days. We did an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) in 24 days. Because it was 24 days of work and 12 days of work.
They said, well – and the naysayers said: Well, it’ll never hold up in court. People will sue. They’ll say you cut corners, you weren’t following all of Congress’ rules to protect the environment. I said, I will put our 12-day product against somebody’s two-year product in front of a judge and ask him to decide which one took two years and which one took 12 days. I think the 12-day product might be better because it was a team of people, a strike team that were focused on getting it done. So some – and this is before we’ve applied AI.
Here's the interesting bit:
Well, then you say, OK, the thing they were working on has been done 80,000 times before in some fashion; what if we used AI to cut a bunch of that work out and make it even shorter? So some of this is just – is just it’s not – the permitting is just the fact that the federal government is decades behind on applying IT to core processes that any private-sector company would have already – would be out of business if they were operating this low. But when you’re a monopoly – if you’re the only place you can get a permit – I guess you can take as much time as you want to.
And there's the problem. Government is rarely interested in efficiency; there are a few exceptions, such as our Air Force and Navy pilots who are right now very efficiently disassembling the theocracy in Iran. But there's no incentive in the energy permitting process for any government organization to get anything done quickly. And that may well be why this won't happen, even if it would help.
As I'm continually pointing out, we solve today's problems with tomorrow's technology. Like it or not, AI is going to be part of that tomorrow. Some people are worried about it taking over and putting them out of a job; trust me, two of our four kids are freelance graphic artists, and we hear a lot of complaining from them as to how AI image generation is cutting into their incomes. It's a legitimate worry, but we have to look at the other side, how AI can help us streamline processes like these.
Now, if we could just find a way to streamline the various levels of government...
