After Months of Delay, Atlantic Coast Pipe Gets NC Water Permit
On Friday, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) issued a federal stream/water crossing permit for Dominion’s $5 billion Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP)–a natural gas pipeline that will stretch from West Virginia through Virginia and slice through the midsection of North Carolina, almost to the border with South Carolina. The permit comes more than a year and a half after Dominion and their partners filed an application for it. It is the final “biggie” permit required to construct the project in NC. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved ACP last October (see FERC Approves Atlantic Coast, Mountain Valley Pipeline Projects). West Virginia previously issued a water crossing permit for the project, and Virginia recently granted a conditional approval for its water crossing permit. NC was the last domino to fall, and now it has. However, the project is still not out of the woods in NC just yet. First, the DEQ attached all sorts of extra requirements to the water permit they issued. Second, even though a water/stream crossing permit is the biggest and most important permit, NC continues to delay the project by withholding other permits (see NC Continues to Delay Atlantic Coast Pipe, Rejects Part of Erosion Plan). Friday’s water permit issuance was, however, a very positive development–a signal that the rest of the permits although delayed, will be forthcoming. Dominion said it will begin construction in NC (and VA and WV) this year, and finish the project sometime in 2019…
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In early January, the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) told Sunoco Logistics Partners to suspend all work on the $2.5 billion Mariner East 2 (ME2) NGL pipline–from one side of the state to the other (see 
Yesterday MDN brought you the news that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has slapped a stop work order on underground horizontal direction drilling (HDD) for Rover Pipeline at the site crossing under the Tuscarawas River (see 
The Ohio EPA continues its yapping insistence that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) *permanently* shut down underground horizontal directional drilling (HDD) work being done by Rover Pipeline near the Tuscarawas River over concerns that nontoxic (totally safe) drilling mud keeps disappearing down the borehole. FERC listened, sort of. In an order dated yesterday, FERC told Rover to *temporarily* stop HDD work at Tuscarawas until Rover can outline a plan for moving forward that FERC has confidence will address concerns over the disappearing drilling mud. When mud used for drilling holes comes out on the surface any place other than the hole from which it went down, it’s called an “inadvertent return.” We call it a leak. However, if that same mud never comes back to the surface, as sometimes happens, it’s fine. Except when it’s a LOT of mud, as is the case in drilling near Tuscarawas where a cumulative 200,000 gallons of it have disappeared down hole, not (so far) coming back out. Sooner or later it seems likely that at least some of that mud will come back to the surface–somewhere. That’s the concern that no doubt prompted FERC to send Rover a letter yesterday telling them to (for now) stop HDD work at Tuscarawas…
You may recall our story about the daughter of a Huntingdon County, PA landowner who took to a tree on her mom’s property in March 2016 in order to illegally stop crews working on tree clearing for the Mariner East 2 pipeline (see 
In 2016 the Pennsylvania legislature, over the objections of PA Gov. Tom Wolf, voted to shift $24 million away from a boondoggle program called the PA Alternative Energy Investment Act and into a new program called the Pipeline Investment Program, or PIPE (see 
In December members of Virginia’s Water Control Board voted 4-3 to approve issuing a water permit/certification for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) project (see 
In December MDN told you that Dominion’s $5 billion Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) project had asked permission from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to begin clearing trees along the path of the pipeline in all three states where the pipeline will run: West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina (see 
Millennium Pipeline is building a tiny, 7.8 mile pipeline in Orange County, NY that will connect the main Millennium pipeline to the CPV Valley Energy Center gas-fired electric plant. Both projects are currently under construction. Millennium’s project, called the Valley Lateral Project, was opposed by the corrupt Andrew Cuomo Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC). The DEC refused to grant necessary permits for the federal project, so the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) voted to overrule DEC and allow it to be built anyway (see 
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) continues to hound the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) about a potential spill of drilling mud by Rover Pipeline near the Tuscarawas River. Last week we told you that OEPA, which has ZERO regulatory oversight of the Rover Pipeline project, had been told (by informants) that when Rover restarted underground horizontal directional drilling (HDD) work at the Tuscarawas site, some 146,000 gallons of drilling mud went down the hole but never came back out (see 
Earlier this week TransCanada (i.e. Columbia Pipeline) broke ground for a new $100 million compressor station that will flow gas through the Mountaineer XPress Pipeline. MDN previously told you that at the end of December the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a final approval for Mountaineer (see