Virginia Legislators: Mountain Valley Pipeline is an "Environmental Catastrophe"

Mountain Valley Pipeline has had a very bad few months.

Since December, the project has suffered a series of disastrous legal and regulatory losses. These are just the latest blows to the partially built 303-mile pipeline, first proposed in 2014 but already years behind schedule and billions over budget, that would transport fracked natural gas from West Virginia to Virginia.

In December, Virginia’s Air Pollution Control Board voted 6-1 to deny a permit to build a compressor station for MVP Southgate – a 75 mile extension that would extend MVP from Virginia to North Carolina. Southgate already had failed – twice – to obtain required permits from North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality for the pipeline itself.

In January and February, unanimous panels of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals yanked permits needed to cross land within the Jefferson National Forest, as well as a key biological opinion from the Fish and Wildlife Service, which is required under the Endangered Species Act. In each case, this was the second time the Fourth Circuit had revoked these permits. The full Fourth Circuit later refused to even consider MVP’s requests to reconsider those panel decisions.

In early April, as discussed at length here, MVP had a very bad day before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, when questions posed by a three judge panel during oral argument on the certificate of public convenience and necessity issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission led many to believe that MVP may lose that certificate when the court issues its decision. The FERC certificate is the foundational permit required for the project.

Read more: https://bluevirginia.us/2022/05/virginia-legislators-mountain-valley-pipeline-is-an-environmental-catastrophe