The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, for the first time, has weighed a pipeline project’s contribution to climate change.
The commission, an independent panel that reviews interstate pipelines and natural gas export terminals, has fought over recent years along partisan lines about how it should consider the emissions caused by these projects and how they contribute to climate change.
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During the Trump administration, FERC’s then-Republican Chairman Neil Chatterjee had taken the view that the commission should determine the direct emissions of operating and constructing natural gas pipelines and liquified natural gas export facilities, without assessing how the emissions from the project contribute to climate change.
FERC approved several natural gas projects under that premise without assessing how their emissions would contribute to climate change.
Richard Glick, a Democrat commissioner recently promoted to chairman by President Biden, was the biggest critic of Chatterjee’s policy.
But on Thursday, Chatterjee, now a regular commissioner, changed his position and brokered a deal with Glick and another Democrat, Allison Clements, to review the significance of a natural gas project’s contribution to climate change.
The project at hand was a small one, and only involved the replacement of a currently operating pipeline, not building a new one. Chatterjee, Glick, and Clements voted to approve a 84-mile replacement of a natural gas pipeline operated by Northern Natural Gas between South Sioux City, Nebraska, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
In approving the expansion, the commissioners assessed that the emissions associated with it would not significantly contribute to climate change.
Republicans James Danly and Mark Christie dissented from the ruling.
Chatterjee acknowledged he had flipped his position. But he said he chose to compromise on the need to review climate change because it enabled the North Natural Gas project to be approved. He said the approval would reassure natural gas pipeline developers, who he said feared the Democratic-led commission would not approve any fossil fuel projects.
Biden has suggested during the campaign he’d prod FERC to make it difficult for developers to obtain federal permits to build pipelines and LNG terminals as part of his climate change agenda.
“This is Biden and Glick’s FERC approving a natural gas project,” Chatterjee told the Washington Examiner. “I stand by the approach the commission took under my leadership, but these are necessary projects, and Chairman Glick promised me he was not against all natural gas infrastructure. This shows that. Now we’ve got him on the record.”
The compromise is a win for Glick too, who can say FERC, for the first time, reviewed a pipeline project’s contribution to climate change, even if, in this case, it led to an approval.
Glick said Thursday that FERC had been ignoring the most urgent environmental issue, climate change, when assessing a project’s costs and benefits.
FERC “cannot claim to have adequately addressed the public interest without addressing the significance” of climate change, Glick said.
“More work to do, but this is an important start,” Glick added.
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The legal question of how FERC should be reviewing the emissions associated with fossil fuel infrastructure and its relation to climate change is unsettled in the courts, but Chatterjee said he hopes the process the commission used in this case could be applied going forward.
“Maybe this a durable path forward that doesn’t involve the courts,” Chatterjee said.
