Offshore WINDPOWER Conference & Exhibition 2018

e-Poster: Streamlining NEPA: Considerations for Issues-Based Analysis for Offshore Wind Projects (Room Station 2)

16 Oct 18
12:50 PM - 1:00 PM

Tracks: Posters, Siting, Wildlife & Environmental Monitoring

Speaker(s): Christine Hartmann, Senior Project Manager, NEPA, SWCA Environmental Consultants

NEPA documents can and should be concise, easy to understand, and defensible. The “kitchen sink” approach to address the threat of litigation has proven to be costly, time-consuming, and ineffective. This approach also results in NEPA documents that attempt to make up for a lack of rigorous analysis by providing voluminous irrelevant information. With the current administration’s push to streamline NEPA (as evidenced by Executive Order 13807 related to environmental review for infrastructure, and by Secretarial Order 3355 on streamlining NEPA as part of the implementation of EO 13807), it has become imperative to identify concrete tools to streamline NEPA without compromising its intent to disclose. Limitations on page number and timeframes for NEPA analysis provide goals but not the necessary techniques to achieve those goals while meeting the NEPA “hard-look” doctrine.