A "very good chance"

U.S. Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist said Tuesday there is a "very good chance" the Senate will approve a slimmed-down energy bill in March. "I think there's a very good chance it will pass it on the floor of the United States Senate in the next three weeks," Frist said in a speech at a meeting of state governors. The new $14 billion legislation replaces a $31 billion Republican-sponsored bill laden with energy industry incentives that passed in the House but stalled in the Senate late last year in the face of Democratic-led opposition. The revised bill, on the other hand, will face opposition in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, House leaders have criticized the new Senate bill because it would drop a provision to protect oil companies from liability lawsuits for MTBE, a water-polluting gasoline additive -- a provision that had angered many Democrats in 2003.

"I'm just not going to give up," Frist said. Nestled in the bill's 1,242 pages are mandatory power grid reliability rules meant to prevent a repeat of last August's massive blackout that left 50 million people without power. Given the bill's uncertain prognosis, Democrats such as Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington have proposed stand-alone legislation to address the electric reliability issue. Republicans and the Bush administration oppose splitting the bill apart. "Some people are holding this reliability bill hostage to get other legislation" passed in the energy bill, Cantwell said at a Senate Energy Committee hearing.

Republican Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, the panel's chairman, said Congress should pass the energy bill to ensure mandatory standards are enacted."We may get to the point where we will ... start considering pieces," he said. "I think that's still a ways off." The Senate's new version would also double the use of corn-distilled ethanol in gasoline, provide billions of dollars in tax incentives to boost oil and natural gas drilling, and back construction of a huge pipeline to carry natural gas from Alaska to the lower 48 U.S. states. The new bill had been expected to go to the Senate floor for debate this week, but Frist decided to delay the bill until March.

Senate aides said the delay was due to Democrats' unwillingness to limit the number of amendments to be offered to the bill. On the electricity front, industry and federal regulators have clashed over who should take the lead in auditing U.S. utilities to ensure they are prepared for future grid mishaps. Domenici has sided with industry rather than the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and FERC has backed away from enacting its own standards after indicating late last year that it was weighing such action. Domenici warned that unilateral FERC action could "wind up tying the industry up in wasteful litigation," echoing a similar statement made last month by the head of the North American Electric Reliability Council.