The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that a gas pipeline expansion to deliver more gas to customers in New York can move forward, arguing that a federal regulatory agency properly evaluated the effects it would have when the line was approved.
Food & Water Watch wrote that FERC violated the National Environmental Policy Act, a 1970 law mandating that federal agencies consider environmental impacts when making proposals, and also did not consider laws in New York City or New York state when it approved Tennessee Gas Pipeline LLC’s East 300 Upgrade project.
The project would place new gas compressor stations in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York meant to pump more fracked gas from the Marcellus and Utica shales.
The group argued that the compressor stations would “maintain or increase pressure in natural gas transmission lines, and operators regularly ‘blowdown’ the stations, releasing methane gas into the local community when too much pressure builds,” according to a statement about the petition.
“These new compressors would allow the company to pipe higher volumes of gas, fracked in Pennsylvania, at greater pressure through an aging pipeline system to Westchester County [in New York],” the group stated.
In response, the D.C. appeals court said that FERC was able to properly determine the emissions generated by the pipeline and added it into its environmental assessment when it approved the project. It found that FERC had addressed the major concerns about the project’s emissions and met its regulatory standards.
Writing for the court, Judge Gregory Katsas wrote that FERC “reasonably concluded that there was too much uncertainty regarding the number and location of additional upstream wells” that the environmental group had flagged in its petition.
“Although we have criticized FERC for failing to demand more information about other pipeline projects, we have never set aside a certificate on that basis,” the judge also wrote.
Judge Katsas added that the regulatory agency “reasonably declined to seek more information from Tennessee Gas because no evidence suggests that a request would have produced useful information.”
The Tennessee Gas Pipeline is a series of natural gas pipelines that run from the coasts of Texas and Louisiana into Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and deliver natural gas to West Virginia, New York, New Jersey, and other northeastern states, according to Kinder Morgan, which operates the system. It’s one of the largest pipeline systems in the United States.
Earlier this year, the D.C. appeals court unanimously upheld federal approvals of another Kinder Morgan gas pipeline system expansion project in Louisiana and Mississippi, rejecting environmentalist groups’ arguments that the government performed an insufficient review of its harms to the environment.
In that case, the Sierra Club and Healthy Gulf said in their 2022 lawsuit seeking to vacate FERC’s approvals that the expansion and the related projects—new pipeline infrastructure projects that connect to the same export terminal and to the terminal itself—would together cause a massive release of emissions.
The D.C. Circuit court, however, said that FERC was not obligated under federal environmental review laws to consider their collective emissions when issuing approvals.
Those projects are all part of a major buildup of liquified natural gas export capacity in the Gulf of Mexico. The United States last year became the world’s largest liquified natural gas exporter, and that capacity is expected to double before the decade ends.
Food & Water Watch has not released a public statement since the D.C. Circuit court’s latest ruling. The group did not respond to a June 17 request for comment by press time.
