Puerto Rico could become “the energy hub of the entire Caribbean area” under a vision laid out by Rob Bishop, the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, who visited the island. Bishop is not thinking of wind or solar. In a press conference held in San Juan on Friday, with Puerto Rican Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González-Colón — a nonvoting representative to the U.S. House — Bishop, R-Utah, said he had been consulting with oil and gas companies in Washington about how to bring more natural gas to the island. “Puerto Rico could be a headquarters for the entire Caribbean area,” Bishop said in response to a question from The Intercept. “That could be a source of energy not just for Puerto Rico, but it could be a source of export for that kind of energy to other places as well. As I look at the future, I envision Puerto Rico as being kind of like the energy hub of the entire Caribbean area. … To do that, you would have to get a lot of people involved, and the private sector has a role in trying to push that forward.”

Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Asked if he will be meeting with oil and gas companies during his time on the island this week, he said he would not, but that he has been talking to them in Washington. When asked which companies in particular he had been meeting with, Bishop said, “This is like … if I start thanking the volunteers on my campaign, I’ll insult somebody by forgetting them. So, let’s just keep it blanket and say I love all of them.” Bishop laid out some specific changes he would like to see to the energy landscape in Puerto Rico. “I would love to see more natural gas ports. They could be either stationary or terminals that float, as we have in other areas of the world,” he said, noting that there “has to be some infrastructure built before that. You just can’t put the ports in there. … There has to be infrastructure to integrate that within the bill.” He did not elaborate on whether he was referring to a specific piece of legislation. He may well have been referring to a bill written by Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, to privatize PREPA by, among other things, switching it from a public to private monopoly and green-lighting new natural gas infrastructure. As Caribbean Business has reported, the bill syncs neatly with a rumored bid from a consortium comprised of Shell North America LNG, Kindle Energy, and ITC Holdings to acquire PREPA assets with $4 billion in private capital. Energy to Puerto Rico, Bishop insisted, “is going to have to be imported. Natural gas would be a brilliant way to do that.” Notably absent from Bishop’s remarks was the idea of renewable power. As Naomi Klein noted recently, clean energy sources were among the most resilient during and after Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island last September. Casa Pueblo, for instance, a long-standing community center in Adjuntas and an early adopter of solar technology, kept its lights on as its neighbors were left without power for weeks and even months after the storm — an “energy oasis.” Nine months after Maria, hundreds of thousands of people remain without power around the island. The center’s director, Arturo Massol, told me not long after Maria, “We don’t have natural gas or coal or oil. But we have plenty of sun, and if we want to make more resilient communities we need to reduce the vulnerability of an energy system that collapses frequently,” as it did several weeks ago when a subcontractor got too close to a downed high-voltage line.

Solar panel debris is seen scattered in a solar panel field in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Humacao, Puerto Rico, on Oct. 2, 2017. Photo: Ricardo Arduengo/AFP/Getty Images

“What we are promoting, instead of centralized generation,” he added, “is distributed energy generation on the roofs of different houses on the island — energy generation at the point of consumption, for the benefit of the local people. The money won’t go to a contractor or power companies. It will go directly to the people.” In addition to his work with Casa Pueblo, Massol was involved in a successful fight, several years back, to stop a proposed 92-mile, $450 million natural gas pipeline. Dubbed Vía de la Muerte, which means “Death Route,” by its opponents, that project was precisely the kind of infrastructure Bishop touted today.