Mountaineer Makes Progress on WV Delivery Pipe; Who Will Feed It?
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.
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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.
What happens when two of three elected town supervisors either have a lease with a pipeline company, or have close family members who have leases with the pipeline company, and they must vote to approve a new power plant project that would use shale gas from that pipeline to power it? It’s called a conflict of interest, and we’re about to find out the answer to that question in Robinson Township (Washington County), PA.
National Grid, the electric and natural gas utility company that serves part of New York City and all of Long Island, has been the target of a smear campaign by New York Gov. Cuomo, who ordered his Dept. of Environment Conservation (DEC) to reject the Williams Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline project in May (see 
Two Members of Congress from the New Jersey delegation–Tom Malinowski and Bonnie Watson Coleman (both liberal Democrats)–are calling on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to issue a “stop-work” order for the PennEast Pipeline project. Not that any real work to build it has even begun! The lib Dems say because of the recent ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, the entire project should be shut down and mothballed.
In April 2017 while using underground horizontal directional drilling (HDD) for the Rover Pipeline project, some 2 million gallons of drilling mud went down a hole near the Tuscarawas River and popped back out where it should not have, harming a wetland by smothering aquatic life (see 
Here’s a cautionary tale for landowners who think they can go court-shopping on the other side of the country to settle their differences with pipelines that cross their land. Don’t do it. A Pennsylvania landowner in Schuylkill County, PA thought he could force Williams’ (Transco Pipeline) into arbitration to compensate him for allowing the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline crossing his land. Except the landowner filed for arbitration in California! Williams/Transco refused to participate in the arbitration since Cali has NOTHING to do with Pennsylvania when it comes to arbitrating compensation for eminent domain.
News of a recent forum held in Washington, D.C. caught our attention because of the topic discussed: property rights and pipelines. Representatives from both sides attended in an effort to find a way to “ease tensions” with landowners in having pipelines cross their property. Inevitably these things usually boil down to compensation–how and how much. We have a few thoughts of our own on the subject.
Talk about disingenuous political posturing by a couple of pompous windbags. Massachusetts’ two U.S. Senators, Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren and Ed “Lackey” Markey have introduced a bill in Congress to block the construction of a single pipeline compressor station–slated to be built in Weymouth, Mass. They even made up a catchy name for their bill: the “Community Outreach, Maintenance, and Preservation by Restricting Export Stations from Subverting Our Regulations Act.” Or “COMPRESSOR Act” for short. What childish dopes.