How many kinds of environmental and/or building permits could be gotten by company A, and then used for company B’s project, after company B buys company A? For example, could we form a special purpose company to pursue navigating all the NEPA stuff for building a power plant at a particular site, and then sell that company to a power company, who could then begin construction immediately?
Consider real estate developers: one company buys the land and develops it, which means do all the construction, and then sells it to other companies who use the buildings.
I propose an extension of this model, where one company will buy the land and do the legal/regulatory work, and then sell the site+permits to another company who will do the construction of the facility.
The advantage here is that rather than one company taking the whole risk of the land and permitting process through to completion of the needed facility, the land and permitting can be handled by a special purpose company which can be sold, construction-ready, to a market of potential buyers. Because there are multiple potential buyers, the risks are lower than they are for one company doing the whole process alone, and normally you can’t sell permits/licenses/etc once they are granted so if the project falls through for some reason the work done on the regulatory stuff is wasted.
If widely adopted as a practice, what I hope this would allow is a lot of potential building sites for needed infrastructure can be prepared for construction simultaneously. While this will do nothing to speed up projects starting now, it would potentially cut years off the construction time of the next generation of facilities as an abundance of sites would be waiting for them already.
Pays out faster than regular real estate development on a within-sector basis.
Here I envision industrial/infrastructure uses, but for areas that are sufficiently difficult (New York or California, for example) it could be viable for things like housing in combination with traditional development (permit company → development company → homebuyer).
You almost definitely cannot get “general construction” permits whereby you can build anything, which on the one hand is limiting and requires strategic choices in permitting.
On the other hand it allows some strategic influence over the development of useful sites.
Special Purpose Permit Companies
How many kinds of environmental and/or building permits could be gotten by company A, and then used for company B’s project, after company B buys company A? For example, could we form a special purpose company to pursue navigating all the NEPA stuff for building a power plant at a particular site, and then sell that company to a power company, who could then begin construction immediately?
Consider real estate developers: one company buys the land and develops it, which means do all the construction, and then sells it to other companies who use the buildings.
I propose an extension of this model, where one company will buy the land and do the legal/regulatory work, and then sell the site+permits to another company who will do the construction of the facility.
The advantage here is that rather than one company taking the whole risk of the land and permitting process through to completion of the needed facility, the land and permitting can be handled by a special purpose company which can be sold, construction-ready, to a market of potential buyers. Because there are multiple potential buyers, the risks are lower than they are for one company doing the whole process alone, and normally you can’t sell permits/licenses/etc once they are granted so if the project falls through for some reason the work done on the regulatory stuff is wasted.
If widely adopted as a practice, what I hope this would allow is a lot of potential building sites for needed infrastructure can be prepared for construction simultaneously. While this will do nothing to speed up projects starting now, it would potentially cut years off the construction time of the next generation of facilities as an abundance of sites would be waiting for them already.
Things to consider:
Pays out faster than regular real estate development on a within-sector basis.
Here I envision industrial/infrastructure uses, but for areas that are sufficiently difficult (New York or California, for example) it could be viable for things like housing in combination with traditional development (permit company → development company → homebuyer).
You almost definitely cannot get “general construction” permits whereby you can build anything, which on the one hand is limiting and requires strategic choices in permitting.
On the other hand it allows some strategic influence over the development of useful sites.