After an arduous fight at the end of the 107th Congress last December turned out to be for naught, the House and Senate are again working on separate comprehensive energy bills. Last year, House and Senate conferees were unable to agree on several sticking points holding up a final bill. While there is no guarantee they will meet with success this year, at least the players are, for the most part, the same, and the members and staff are well aware of what stopped the process last year. The fact that Republicans now control both the House and the Senate makes it more likely that agreement on a final bill will be reached this year.

The House bill, H.R. 6, is, as it was last year, actually a conglomeration of four separate pieces of legislation. Four committees—Energy and Commerce, Resources, Ways and Means, and Science—passed individual titles of the overall bill in recent weeks, and the House leadership melded them into one bill, which passed the House in early April.

Similarly, the Senate bill also combines three different bills. The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources recently approved its part of the overall bill on a near party-line vote, with only Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) voting with the Republican majority to send the bill to the floor. Landrieu is an oil-state senator who tends to side with the Bush administration on increasing energy supply.

The two segments of the bill that the Energy Committee is not responsible for—state energy programs and energy tax incentives—are the purview of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, respectively. Both segments will be considered as amendments on the Senate floor. Amendments related to global climate change will also be considered on the Senate floor. Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) declined to take up that contentious issue in committee.

By the time you read this article, it is likely that the full Senate will have approved its version of comprehensive energy legislation. Let's take a look at a couple of the key provisions of each bill.

Research and Development—Both bills contain research and development titles that would, for the most part, authorize increases—in some cases, significant ones—in major Department of Energy research programs for renewable energy resources, nuclear energy, fossil energy, and science research. Both the House and Senate bills authorize significant funding increases for the DOE Office of Science, the organization that funds a large portion of basic energy research. The Senate offers slightly less than the House, but the small differences can be worked out in conference. Both bills also would raise the Office of Science to the level of Assistant Secretary, which would give it increased clout.

Both bills authorize full funding for the president's Clean Coal Power Initiative ($200 million per year through fiscal 2007) and full funding for the president's FreedomCAR and FreedomFuel hydrogen initiatives through fiscal 2008 ($1.8 billion total).

Electricity—Both bills have electricity titles whose purpose is to improve the state of the nation's transmission grids. There are differences between the two bills in this area, however, particularly with regard to so-called Standard Market Design and under what conditions the Public Utility Regulatory Policy Act would be repealed.

Under Standard Market Design, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would assume authority over regional transmission grids to create a national standard. The concept is a controversial one, opposed by many members of Congress from southern states (served by the Tennessee Valley Authority) and western states (served by the Bonneville Power Administration) because of concerns that it would force states to open up local transmission lines to regional competitors. Addressing those concerns, the Senate bill would prohibit FERC from issuing a final Standard Market Design rule until July 2005 and expresses the "sense of the Senate" that participation be based on voluntary, rather than mandatory, membership. The House bill would not go that far, but would exempt retail and wholesale power consumers, predominantly in the South, who are assured of fixed electricity prices under state law.

As they were last year, major sticking points between the House and Senate bills are likely to be whether or not to allow oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (House for; Senate against), whether or not to impose a Renewable Portfolio Standard (and at what level) on utilities, whether to impose annually increasing ethanol use requirements on oil companies (and also whether to ban use of the gasoline additive MBTE), and whether to require increased corporate average fuel economy standards for automobiles.

These are not trivial disagreements. It will take an incredible amount of work, good will, wheeling and dealing, and patience to put it all together and report out a final energy bill this year. The good news is that because this is only the beginning of the 108th Congress, there is considerably more time for the two sides to reach agreement.Whether any amount of time is enough time remains to be seen.

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