The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission managed to allay concerns about greenhouse gas emissions to issue a long-sought permit Friday to build a pipeline to move natural gas from the shale fields of Pennsylvania to utilities in the Northeast.
The regulators issued a 3-1 majority decision with two Republicans and one Democrat voting in favor of Transco’s pipeline project to connect New York and points north, furthering President Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.
The two Republicans, Chairman Neil Chatterjee and Commissioner Bernard McNamee, voted in favor of the project’s certificate approval, which looked at a range of environmental factors, but didn’t go far enough for Democrats. Yet, despite their differences on the issue of greenhouse gas emissions, they managed to gain the vote of Democratic Commissioner Cheryl LaFleur, who concurred in full with the pipeline’s approval.
“After carefully balancing the need for the project and its environmental impacts, I find the project is in the public interest,” she wrote in her concurring remarks.
LaFleur has been the swing vote on the commission when it comes to the dividing issue of climate change in approving key projects to move much-needed natural gas into the Northeast states and in approving export terminals that are key to the Trump agenda. Her term on the commission comes to an end at the end of June, and the commission is already lacking one member.
Despite concurring with Republicans on the commission, LaFleur said the order still does not address to her satisfaction the downstream effects of greenhouse gas emissions after natural gas in the pipeline is burned. But she agreed with the order because of the sizable other benefits it would entail for the Northeast, such as displacing heating oil, which is far more polluting than natural gas.
LaFleur also conducted her own downstream analysis. She included the results of the analysis in her concurring statement, showing the project would result in a 4.7% increase in emissions for New York, and a 0.13% increase for the nation.
She also notes that the company building the pipeline attempts to account for these emission increases by calculating the amount of emissions reductions that would result from switching from heating oil to natural gas. That convinced her to concur with the commission’s order, although she thinks the commission can easily do its own analysis of downstream emissions.
Fellow Democrat Richard Glick, the only dissenting voice on Friday’s order, could not go along with LaFleur. Although he found some things laudable about the order, the commission’s lack of commitment to calculating downstream emissions was a bridge too far.
“The Commission’s refusal to consider the significance of the reasonably foreseeable indirect effects of downstream emissions is particularly vexing here because the Commission notes — without any verification — the ‘hypothetical scenario’ posited by Transco that would cause the Project to ‘more than offset net GHG emissions,’” Glick wrote in his dissenting comments.
The Trump administration has praised the commission for its ability to find breakthroughs in approving projects, despite disagreements on how it measures the effects of climate change-causing emissions.
In February, the commission approved the Venture Global Calcasieu Pass LNG natural gas export terminal in another 3-1 vote, in which Glick also dissented.
Activist groups and states opposed to fossil fuel development have succeeded in blocking many of the proposed pipeline projects on the commission’s list to approve, of which the Transco pipeline is one.
The administration argues that the pipelines would help displace the use of oil and other dirtier fuels in the Northeast, as the region is one of the nation’s most geographically constrained when it comes to energy. The region resides on the end of the supply chain that feeds the rest of the nation natural gas and other energy commodities.
The president issued an executive order in recent weeks that seeks to override state decisions that use federal clean water permitting decisions to block pipelines. The administration recently proposed a rule to open the door to using rail cars to move natural gas into the region to bypass the pipeline approval process altogether.
Also on Friday, in a separate action, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission staff issued the final environmental review for a liquefied natural gas terminal called Plaquemines LNG and its connected Gator Express Pipeline project. The environmental review will be used to make the final decision by the commission on the project at a later date.
Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Rick Perry approved the export licenses for two LNG export terminals while at an energy summit in Brussels on Thursday. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy share responsibility for approving LNG export facilities. LNG exports and pipeline development are both pillars of Trump’s energy dominance agenda.
