Spectra Energy’s Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) pipeline project is an $876 million expansion of the existing Algonquin pipeline system designed to carry 342 million cubic feet of natural gas per day to New England states that badly need the gas. On March 3, 2015 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued their final approval for the project, allowing it to go forward. Construction began in 2015 and, following extreme opposition from New York State over a small portion of the project, it finally went online in in 2016. New York’s radical, anti-drilling governor, Andy Cuomo, tried to stop the Algonquin using the flimsy excuse that some of the drilling for the pipeline would happen a half mile from a nuclear power plant–a plant that’s shutting down anyway (see Gov. Cuomo Asks FERC to Halt Algonquin Pipeline Near Nuke Plant). A few weeks after Cuomo requested FERC shut it down, they told him “no”–which was the cue for Big Green groups to file an appeal with the liberal District of Columbia Court of Appeals (see Radical Enviro Groups File Appeal to Stop AIM Pipeline in NY/CT). Didn’t work. New York State’s two radically leftist Democrat Senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, the Senator nobody knows about and nobody cares about, tried to stop it too (see NY’s 2 Radical Senators Call for Halt in Building Algonquin Pipeline). Didn’t work. Now that the pipeline expansion has been up and running safely for more than a year, you’d think they would give up. Nope. Cuomo previously ordered a “safety analysis” of the project, back in 2016. That report was just released (executive summary embedded below) and four state agencies, all under the executive branch umbrella (i.e., under Cuomo’s thumb), jointly wrote a letter to FERC asking FERC to further hassle the AIM project by restricting flows along it and shutting it down when work to decommission the nearby nuke plant begins…
