3rd Circuit Vacates NJ Water Permit for NESE Pipeline Project
Big Green scored a win yesterday — but not the win they’re telling you they got. On Tuesday, September 8, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit vacated the Clean Water Act Section 401 water quality certification (WQC) that the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) issued last November for Williams/Transco’s Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) project — the $1 billion, 400,000 Dth/d expansion that carries Marcellus gas from Pennsylvania, across New Jersey, under Raritan Bay, and into New York City (see Trump Won: New York & New Jersey Issue Water Permits for NESE Pipe and Radicals Sue NY, NJ to Block NESE Pipeline Water Permits). Read the opinion closely, though, and the court flatly rejected the radicals’ headline argument. It did find, however, that NJDEP wrote a sloppy permit and didn’t show its work. The pipeline isn’t dead. The paperwork is. Read More “3rd Circuit Vacates NJ Water Permit for NESE Pipeline Project”
West Virginia has sued the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission in federal court, arguing that two Pennsylvania laws — Act 40 of 2017 and Act 114 of 2020 — built a wall around the state’s “alternative energy credit” market and locked out every power producer outside Pennsylvania’s borders. West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey filed the 54-page complaint on September 3 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, and here’s the kicker: the PUC’s own annual report, published seven months earlier, told the legislature that these very rules needed a second look. 
A federal judge in Knoxville has thrown out the environmental review behind the Tennessee Valley Authority’s $2.5 billion Kingston gas plant — and almost nobody has seen the ruling, because it’s sealed. We pulled the public docket and found the whole story hiding in TVA’s own court filings. On August 31, U.S. District Judge Curtis L. Collier granted partial summary judgment to Appalachian Voices, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sierra Club, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center. The judge vacated TVA’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Record of Decision (ROD) for the plant, which is replacing nine coal units at the old Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tennessee — the site of the infamous 2008 coal ash spill. 
For four years, the province of Québec has had one answer for the drillers whose mineral rights it seized: see you in court. Last week that changed — a little. Questerre Energy announced it has signed a mediation protocol with Québec’s Attorney General and the province’s Ministry of the Economy, Innovation and Energy, agreeing to sit down at a table and talk. Longtime MDN readers know the backstory. Québec sits on top of a big slice of the Utica Shale — yes, the same Utica that runs under Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. 
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: D.C. gas ban gets favorable hearing in federal appeals court; NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas retreats as weather set to cool down; End of life oil and gas wells in the United States – practical and legal issues; INTERNATIONAL: Brent nears $100 on Mideast strikes; Enbridge names Harradence CEO, Ebel retires Jan. 1, 2027. 
Two things happened last week, and both of them are unusual. Pennsylvania dropped a rig to 15, pulling the combined Marcellus/Utica down to 33 — a number we haven’t printed since the fall of 2024. And the national count came in at 588 for the third consecutive week. Not 588, then 587, then 589. The same number, three times in a row. We’ve been writing this column a long time, and we can’t recall the national count sitting perfectly still for three straight reports. Underneath it, the shuffle continued: two more oil rigs, two fewer gas rigs. Look at the price sheet, and you’ll see why. WTI settled Friday near $90.76 a barrel. Natural gas settled around $2.98 per MMBtu. 
Devon Energy’s Coterra unit is asking Pennsylvania regulators for permission to lay 18.4 miles of 20-inch freshwater pipeline across three Susquehanna County townships — which is a strange thing to spend money on if you’re about to sell the place. The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) published the notice in the September 5 Pennsylvania Bulletin, opening a comment window that closes October 5. The project is the Brooks to Forwood Temporary Waterline, running through Springville, Lathrop, and Lenox townships. 
Shell Chemical Appalachia signed a consent order and agreement (COA) with the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) last Friday, Sept. 4, agreeing to hand over $15 million to settle three years’ worth of air, storage tank, and water violations at its Monaca (Beaver County) ethane cracker. Half of it — $7.5 million — is an actual civil penalty. The other half is a “contribution” to a brand-new community fund. If that arrangement sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same two-bucket structure the Shapiro administration used to squeeze nearly $10 million out of Shell back in May 2023. 
The hill above Homer City now has more people working on it than the borough below has living in it. Homer City Generation dropped a Labor Day announcement on Friday: more than 1,800 direct-hire tradespeople and skilled contractors are on site building the 4.4-gigawatt (GW) gas-fired plant and data center campus rising from the bones of what was once Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power station. The borough of Homer City has roughly 1,800 residents. That’s a nice bit of symmetry, and it says more about what this project means to Indiana County than any press release paragraph could. 
Ohio has asked PJM to dust off a rarely used piece of grid-planning machinery — a tool invented to string wires to offshore wind farms — and use it instead to speed up $4.2 billion in new high-voltage power lines to the 10-gigawatt SoftBank data center and gas plant complex at Piketon. We got our hands on the letter. It’s dated June 15, 2026, from PUCO Federal Energy Advocate Sarah J. Parrot to PJM President and CEO David E. Mills, and it’s been sitting quietly for nearly three months. It surfaced this week because PJM is briefing its Transmission Expansion Advisory Committee (TEAC) on the request today, Sept. 8, to use the “state agreement approach.” 
Six weeks after announcing it would sell up to 49% of its $1.2 billion Florida Energy Pathway pipeline (see 