Washington's most durable constraint on energy infrastructure isn't capital — it's paper. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review process routinely takes five to ten years to approve a single interstate pipeline, and that delay has created something unusual: a backlog of projects that are financially engineered, contractually anchored, and physically ready to build. They are stuck in regulatory limbo, not in the boardroom.
Any executive action or legislation that compresses NEPA timelines — whether through page-count limits on environmental reviews, deadline mandates for agency sign-off, or expanded use of categorical exclusions — does not create new demand. It unlocks revenue that midstream companies have already underwritten.