EPA’s Wheeler Rips into Cuomo, Pipe Veto “Worst Enviro Decision”
Andrew Cuomo, the man-child governor of New York, is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Or week. For the past few weeks the New York Post has repeatedly hammered Cuomo over his decision to block the Williams Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline project that would bring critical new supplies of natgas to Long Island and New York City. The Wall Street Journal also joined in by hammering Cuomo over the same issue, pointing out Cuomo is to blame for thousands of utility customers of National Grid who now cannot connect, yet Cuomo is forcing National Grid to add them anyway (see WSJ Editorial Board Blasts NY Gov. Cuomo for Bullying National Grid).
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A recent editorial written by the editors of the Wall Street Journal begins with this superb sentence: “New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has a habit of bullying others to cover for and fix his policy blunders.” It goes on to rip Cuomo to shreds for his bullying of National Grid, forcing the company to add new natural gas customers against its wishes because come wintertime, they may not have enough gas to service all customers in the Greater New York City/Long Island region. Why a moratorium on new customers? Because Cuomo denied National Grid a pipeline to supply the gas they need–the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline.
In April 2018 Williams filed a request with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to expand capacity along the mighty Transco Pipeline to increase the amount of gas the pipeline can flow to the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern U.S by 296,375 dekatherms (296 million cubic feet) per day (see 
Did you know that building just two new compressor stations in Pennsylvania will bring the state an extra $100 million in economic activity and support 680 direct, indirect and induced jobs? We sure didn’t! Last week Williams filed a newly published study with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on the economic impact of their proposed Leidy South Expansion Project (full study embedded below). The study makes an irrefutable case for building the new compressor stations in Luzerne and Schuylkill counties.
As MDN previously reported, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit bought the lies of colluding Big Green groups and decided to put a hold on a permit issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) that allows the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) to build through areas with so-called endangered and threatened species (see 
In April, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals slapped down both New York and North Carolina regulators who tried to block three important Williams pipeline projects, all related to the mighty Transco Pipeline (see 
New York City’s CBS affiliate WLNY Channel 2 recently got a sit-down interview with National Grid President John Bruckner to discuss the company’s moratorium on new gas hook-ups, to grill Bruckner on whether or not there really is a gas shortage in the region. Bruckner handled the adversarial interview well, telling the reporter that yes, there really is a shortage. Currently there is a shortage between supply and demand–to the tune of 10,000 homes. Bruckner said if there’s a serious cold snap this winter, Long Island and parts of NYC served by National Grid will experience a service outage–a natural gas blackout, if you will. It’s a scary prospect.
Mountaineer Gas it close to completing Phase One of its Eastern Panhandle Expansion project in West Virginia, a 22.5-mile, 10-inch-diameter steel pipeline from Morgan County to Berkeley County. The project is designed to deliver Marcellus/Utica natural gas via local distribution channels to a new $150 million industrial facility in Berkeley County, WV, and to provide “a redundant supply” of gas to some 6,000 local businesses and residents in the Tri-State area. The system is supposed to be fed by a short 3.5-mile pipeline from Columbia Gas running under the Potomac River from Maryland into WV.
For residents who want to build a new home or business in either Northampton or Easthampton (Hampshire County), Massachusetts, and connect to natural gas supplies–you can forget about it. Columbia Gas of Massachusetts has announced that a moratorium on new natural gas customers in those two municipalities, in place since 2015, will become permanent. Citing “cost impacts and benefits” to customers, Columbia’s president says the company will no longer build what it called the “alternate backfeed” pipeline project–a 6-mile pipe that would have run between Agawam and Holyoke to supply Northampton and Easthampton.
In August, Enterprise Products Partners, the builder and operator of the Appalachia-to-Texas Express (ATEX) ethane pipeline, launched an open season to gauge interest in expanding the capacity along the 1,192-mile pipeline (see 
Sounding like North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Friday “ordered” National Grid to connect 1,157 new natural gas customers previously denied service because National Grid won’t have enough natural gas on the coldest days in winter to service everyone. New York has descended into a police state, with our Dear Leader ordering around companies in contravention of established law. Yet not a peep from mainstream news organizations about Cuomo’s excessive abuse of power.
We’ve seen this movie before. The radical fringe leftists from the Sierra Club (disgusting organization) convinced the clown judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (i.e. Circus) to block construction of Dominion Energy’s 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) pipeline by getting the court to toss U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permits that allow the project to kill a couple of bats along a few miles of the project (see 
How would you like to find out that your billion dollar pipeline project has just been denied another permit–by getting a tweet? That’s what happened to PennEast Pipeline on Friday. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy tweeted that NJ’s Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) is, once again, denying a federal Clean Water Act Section 401 stream crossing permit for the project. The putz delivered the news to PennEast via a tweet–can you believe that? The NJ DEP is rejecting the permit not for any scientific reasons, which is what the law stipulates, but because of politics.