Mountain Valley: As the pipeline turns

Two new episodes in the long-running energy soap opera called the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

On Feb. 13, a federal appeals court again rebuffed local opponents of the natural gas pipeline being constructed 304 miles across West Virginia to Virginia and North Carolina, carrying gas from the Marcellus and Utica shale formations. The case has been up and down from federal courts, putting the project in suspended animation.

The courts in many cases have consistently ruled that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has authority to grant the pipeline developers the right of federal eminent domain, overriding state and local land use laws.

Just a week later (Feb. 20), the pipeline developers – a joint venture of Equitrans Midstream Corporation; Next Era Energy; Consolidated Edison; AltaGas; and RGC Resources, with Cannonsburg, Pa.-based Equitrans the major partner and eventual operator of the pipeline – announced another delay in the project and a significant hike in the estimated cost.

In the latest court case, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, on remand from the Supreme Court, said that “we again conclude that the Natural Gas Act explicitly strips district courts of jurisdiction to review a FERC certificate after a court of appeals receives the record in a suit challenging that certificate.”

An analysis from the D.C. law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld wrote, “The D.C. Circuit came to the same conclusion in a 2022 decision. However, that decision was vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court,” which remanded the case back to the appeals court because of the wording of the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) and its application in a case involving review of a business merger, Axon Enterprise Inc. v. FTC.

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