Environmental advocates asked a federal court Tuesday to review a federal permit for the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
Appalachian Mountain Advocates, a law firm representing a coalition of environmental and citizen groups, filed a petition with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The groups, which include the Sierra Club, West Virginia Rivers Coalition, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, Appalachian Voices and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, are asking the court to review a federal permit issued by the Army Corps of Engineers.
The Nationwide Permit 12, which falls under Section 404 of the federal Clean Water Act, sets out how the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) must be built through streams and wetlands in West Virginia.
In a letter sent last month to Army Corps’ Huntington District, the groups argue the pipeline developer has admitted it cannot cross parts of the Greenbrier, West Fork and Buckhannon rivers in the 72-hour time frame mandated by the permit, and thus its Nationwide Permit 12 should be revoked.
The request comes days after the 4th Circuit stayed the same permit issued to the Mountain Valley Pipeline for failing to complete construction quickly enough.
Once completed, the 600-mile, 42-inch ACP pipeline will bring natural gas from West Virginia through Virginia to North Carolina. The ACP is being jointly developed by Dominion Energy, Duke Energy, Piedmont Natural Gas and Southern Company Gas.
A spokesperson for the ACP could not be reached for comment.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection has created a new webpage designed to help the public navigate maps and information about the five major natural gas pipelines in West Virginia that have been proposed or are under construction.
In a news release Monday, WV DEP said the site includes, “detailed maps, transcripts, (and) permit information” on a single webpage.
The five pipelines that are the focus of the webpage are the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, Mountain Valley Pipeline, the Mountaineer Gas Company Eastern Panhandle Expansion Project, Mountaineer Xpress Pipeline, and the Rover Pipeline.
The webpage connects detailed maps of the proposed routes and DEP’s searchable online database with information about inspections and enforcement actions and any permit modifications.
The site also links to find public hearing transcripts, responses to comments received at public hearings, and press releases about the pipelines. The DEP says the page will be updated as more information becomes available.
The page also has a place to submit reports of possible permit violations.
Boordering western Pennsylvania, the landscape of eastern Ohio is changing, literally. Stretches of hillsides are being cleared of trees, to make way for well pads and pipelines.
The oil and gas industry is starting to take a front seat in what’s traditionally been rural coal country. As in Pennsylvania, some people are excited about the new industry. But others are concerned that there’s not enough regulation in place to protect waterways, and other aspects of the environment, from potential harm.
In rural Belmont County, commissioner President Mark Thomas remembers riding his bike on what are called coal gobs. “It’s the waste from the coal,” Thomas explains. “They started dumping and they started dumping and dumping, and next thing you know have a hill.” The coal waste came from two mines owned by Murray Energy. The mines sit along the banks of Captina Creek, a watershed the feeds directly into the Ohio River. The region, around where Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia meet, is called the Appalachian Coal Basin, and it’s considered to one of the largest coal fields in the country.
By the late 1970s, Murray Energy’s coal mines had left the water quality in Captina Creek so bad that large sections of it were declared dead. Local citizens mounted an effort to clean up the stream and, with help from the coal companies, removed the gob piles from its banks.
Today, Captina is considered one the cleanest streams that feeds into the Ohio. People swim and fish in it. Abbey Hayward, Captina Creek Watershed Coordinator at the Belmont County Soil and Water Conservation District, keeps an eye on the rare Eastern Hellbender salamander that lives here. “That species in particular is sensitive to clear water,” she says. “They need clearer water because they breathe through their skin.”
Hayward moved to this area late last year to keep watch over the creek. She didn’t really know anything about mining. Her second day on the job, there was a meeting of area residents, environmental groups, and coal companies to talk about the creek.
“That was impressive to me,” Hayward recalls. “Because I was like, they do work together? This is going to be great; I have people helping!”
Credit Julie Grant / Allegheny Front
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Allegheny Front
Abbey Hayward, a watershed coordinator in Belmont County, says she gets calls everyday from people concerned about pipelines being built near their homes.
But Hayward soon noticed drilling rigs on the hillsides, a sign of energy companies fracking for natural gas. Even though no one in her office, nor the Captina Creek Watershed Action Plan, had mentioned fracking, she started to understand how quickly the industry was moving in to Belmont County.
Then last spring, she started getting flooded with phone calls about pipelines. “We get calls all the time, and they’re increasing,” she says. “It’s, ‘Somebody’s cutting these trees down. And, ‘Somebody’s doing something in this creek,’ and we don’t know what’s going on.”
Energy companies need pipelines to connect their frack wells with the wider energy distribution system. But they aren’t necessarily informing local offices, like Hayward’s, about what they’re doing. “Some people are very understanding, because they’ve been calling 15 different offices trying to get an answer. And I’ve had some landowners who are very upset, because they have somebody doing work in their back 40, encroaching on their water supply,” Hayward says.
Hayward tries to track things down, but it’s different than calling the local coal company, where the people who work there also live in the community. There are at least a dozen pipeline companies building here, from places like Oklahoma, Texas, Alberta, Canada. “You don’t get a lot of feedback,” Hayward says. “You try to contact the right person, and there’s just so many people. And they move so fast because they have deadlines. Do I talk to the environmental representative? Do I talk to a land man?…. I don’t know who to go to.”
This is especially concerning to her considering what’s happened with the Rover pipeline, a 700 mile natural gas transmission line being built from West Virginia, through Ohio, and into Michigan. Rover has already been cited by Ohio regulators 13 times, and spilled more than 2 million gallons of diesel-laced drilling mud into a pristine Ohio wetland near a municipal water supply.
Over the summer, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission stepped in to halt Rover’s construction at Captina Creek and elsewhere.
“The known unknown of the pipeline industry”
Ted Auch, who collects data about the oil and gas industry in Ohio for a non-profit called Fractracker, doesn’t worry as much about spills by the big transmission lines, like Rover.
“Those get reported most of the time, and they get quite a bit of media coverage,” he says. “What I worry about are these gathering lines.”
Gathering pipelines connect drilling well pads to the larger gas distribution system, and Auch doesn’t think there’s enough information about their routes to regulate them properly. He calls them “the known unknown of the pipeline industry.“
EXPLORE: FracTracker’s Oil & Gas Development Map
Ohio and Pennsylvania are among the states with the most local gathering lines in the U.S. According to a report from the American Petroleum Institute, there are about 24,000 miles of these lines in Ohio alone. When he talks with county officials, Auch says they know where pipelines cross county and state roads, “But in between there we have no idea what it’s doing…that’s 95-percent of the pipeline.”
Pipelines over a certain size need to be certified by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. If a pipeline builder plans to cross a creek or other waterway, and uses a method that will impact the water, it also needs a state certification.
According to data by the Ohio EPA, the state has issued more than thirty of these stream and wetland crossing certificates for pipeline projects in Belmont County in the past three years.
But when it comes to siting those smaller gathering lines, the state says local zoning authorities are in charge. Belmont County Commission President Mark Thomas says his county, like many in rural Ohio, don’t have zoning rules. “The county has no teeth as far as regulations,” he says.
Credit Liza Butler
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A pipeline crossing Captina Creek.
Thomas says he has some concerns with how quickly fracking and pipelines are moving into his region. “Are these industries regulated, as was coal? Is it safer? What’s it going to do to the environment?,” he wonders. “The best we can do is look to the state.”
As the coal economy fades, Thomas weighs those risks with the benefits. He’s convinced the oil and gas industry will help this region reinvent itself after coal, long-term. A chemical company based in Thailand has purchased property in Belmont County, along the Ohio River, and is expected to announce by the end of the year ifit will build a multi-billion dollar ethane cracker. Similar to the Shell plant under construction in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, it would use the natural gas from fracking to create the building blocks for plastic. Thomas believes it could make natural gas the next job-creator in this region.
Abbey Hayward has no intention of trying to stop the pipeline. Still, she doesn’t like seeing construction equipment sitting right in Captina Creek, and she had no authority to find out more about it. “They have tight deadlines, and somebody is paying them a lot of money and they’re paying people, and I’m just somebody who’s trying to keep a creek nice,” she says.
Top photo: In May, workers clean up a 2 million gallon spill of drilling mud by Energy Transfer into a pristine wetland in Stark County, Ohio while building its Rover pipeline that will run from West Virginia to Michigan. The federal government shut down construction while the company makes improvements. Photo: Ohio EPA
The Senate has approved two Republicans nominated by President Donald Trump to serve on the federal commission that oversees the nation’s power grid and natural gas pipelines.
Senators’ unanimous votes Thursday approving Senate aide Neil Chatterjee and Pennsylvania utility regulator Robert Powelson restore a voting quorum on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Only one commissioner currently serves on the panel, leaving it without a quorum and unable to make decisions on interstate pipelines and other projects worth billions of dollars.
Trump has promised to boost energy production and exports as part of a bid to establish “energy dominance” for the United States, but the FERC vacancies have hobbled the agency’s ability to make decisions.
More than a dozen major projects and utility mergers have been in regulatory limbo for months. The projects include the $2 billion Nexus pipeline in Ohio and Michigan; the $1 billion PennEast pipeline in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; and the $5 billion Atlantic Coast Pipeline in West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina.
Don Santa, president and CEO of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, hailed the Senate votes, which business groups and lawmakers have been urging for months. FERC has been without a quorum since February.
“The commission now can get back to work thoroughly reviewing the many energy infrastructure projects of national importance that have been sidelined in recent months,” Santa said.
He and other business leaders said they also were encouraged that Trump has formally nominated Republican Kevin McIntyre to be FERC chairman and Democrat Richard Glick to round out the five-member panel. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has scheduled a hearing on the two nominees in September.
Karen Harbert, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute, said Chatterjee and Powelson are “exceptionally well-qualified and will serve with distinction.”
While overdue, the Senate’s action “will now allow American energy companies the ability to move forward with projects that will create jobs and improve our security,” Harbert said.
Chatterjee, of Kentucky, is an energy adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., while Powelson serves on the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission and is president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.
The Southern Environmental Law Center, an advocacy group that opposes the massive Atlantic Coast pipeline, urged the new commissioners to use caution in reviewing the three-state pipeline and other projects.
“The Trump administration’s lack of organization has caused a backlog of projects waiting for FERC review, but the American people should not have to pay for this mismanagement with hastily approved pipelines,” said Greg Buppert, a lawyer for the group. He urged commissioners to grant the law center’s request for a hearing on whether the pipeline is needed.
A federal agency has approved construction plans for one of the major natural gas pipelines planned in the region. The 4.2 billion dollar Rover pipeline project is slated to begin phase one of construction this year.
The 510-mile, interstate Rover pipeline is designed to move 3.25 billion cubic feet of Marcellus and Utica shale gas from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio to Michigan. Despite objections by landowners in Ohio and the Sierra Club, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says the market benefits of the 42-inch pipeline “outweigh any adverse effects … on landowners and surrounding communities.”
About a quarter of the planned path is along existing pipeline corridors, and the agency’s approval means the company may claim eminent domain for other sections of the route. The mainline would start in Monroe County, Ohio, with branches stretching into West Virginia’s Doddridge and Ohio counties, and across Hancock County into Pennsylvania.
Several other pipelines are still waiting for federal approval, including the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Mountain Valley Pipeline.
Residents in three western Virginia counties will have a chance to weigh in a proposed new path of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said this week that it will collect comments from the public and agencies on changes to the $5 billion natural gas pipeline proposal.
The companies behind the project revised the route in February to avoid sensitive animal habitat in national forests in Virginia and West Virginia. The new route would affect about 249 additional landowners in Highland, August and Bath counties and parts of West Virginia.
Federal officials will take public comment on the proposal during hearings in Marlinton, West Virginia, on May 20 and Hot Springs, Virginia on May 21.
