NC Nervous About Having Just One Interstate NatGas Pipeline
No doubt you heard about the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, a pipeline that flows a significant amount of refined products (gasoline and diesel fuel) from the Gulf Coast where it’s refined as far north as New Jersey. Most of the gasoline supply for states like North and South Carolina comes from the Colonial Pipeline. When the pipeline went offline for over a week, most gas stations in NC ran out of gas. It was panic city across the state. The outage pointed out the weakness of having most of a state’s supply of fuel provided by a single pipeline. Top officials in NC are equally (perhaps more) concerned that most of the state’s natural gas supply comes from a single interstate pipeline: the mighty Williams Transco pipeline.
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Utility giant Duke Energy Corp. is in the process of modifying eight of its biggest coal-fired electric generating plants in North Carolina to burn natural gas instead. The work will cost Duke roughly $283 million. Work is already complete on six of the eight plants, with the final two slated to be done later this year. There is a tie-in with the Marcellus/Utica.
Williams, via its wholly-owned subsidiary Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line (Transco), has filed a lawsuit against Mountain Valley Pipeline (a competitor) over MVP’s plan to extend the pipeline an extra 75 miles from southern Virginia into North Carolina. Williams claims some of the land MVP wants to use under eminent domain crosses into Transco’s easements and building MVP so close to Transco may damage Transco’s pipeline and the cathodic anti-corrosion system that protects it.
Last August the North Carolina Dept. of Environmental Quality (DEQ) rejected a water permit for Equitrans’ proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) Southgate project (see 
The good news for Equitrans’ 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) is that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit last week overruled North Carolina’s Dept. of Environmental Quality in rejecting a water permit for the project (see today’s lead story). However, MVP wasn’t letting last year’s DEQ action slow it down. In January MVP reluctantly filed eminent domain lawsuits against 100 landowners who refuse to reasonably negotiate an easement for the pipeline.
The City of Monroe, North Carolina is a shining example of what other cities should do. The city recently launched a new LNG facility online (took three years to build). The city buys natural gas on the open market when the price is low, liquefies and stores it, and then regasifies it for use later–saving residents money. Smart folks running Monroe.
Democrat governors across the country are now mimicking the example set by the dictator of New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo abuses state power to reject fossil fuel projects (unconstitutional in our opinion), telling NY’s state environmental agency to reject all new pipelines. Roy Cooper, governor of North Carolina, is the latest Cuomo wannabe. Cooper instructed his state’s environmental agency, the Dept. of Environmental Quality (DEQ), to reject permits for Equitrans’ proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) Southgate project. Which the DEQ did yesterday. The agency tried to disguise the rejection using lame excuses, but the reason for the rejection was politics, plain and simple.
Some 12 days ago Dominion Energy announced it is throwing in the towel and canceling the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) project that would have stretched from West Virginia to North Carolina. The company also announced it is selling its pipeline business to Warren Buffett (see 
Equitrans Midstream’s 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project is now 92% complete and will be done and online in early 2021 (see 
A year ago North Carolina’s Republican-controlled General Assembly launched an investigation into a permit issued by Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper’s Dept. of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to allow the Atlantic Coast Pipeline project to get built (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