The United States should help the natural gas industry push back against opposition by environmental groups to pipeline projects by adopting new regulations or laws that favor infrastructure, backers of the industry said at a conference this week, Reuters reports.
Suppliers in the United States, the world’s biggest natural gas producer, have had a difficult time in recent years getting shipments to some regions, including fuel-hungry New England, as environmental lawsuits by states, green groups and property owners have tied up pipeline construction.
The administration of President Donald Trump has said that constraints on pipelines and other energy infrastructure can trigger price spikes and pose a risk to national security but has yet to intervene in state or local-level permitting issues.
“It’s definitely not getting easier to build a new pipeline,” Stanley Chapman, executive vice president and president of U.S. natural gas pipelines at TransCanada Corp, told Reuters on the sidelines at the World Gas Conference in Washington.
“I’m seeing more already-approved pipeline projects that are under construction get held up by a judge in lawsuits and this has to be addressed either by FERC or with legislation,” he said. FERC, or the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, oversees construction of new pipelines.
TransCanada owns about 30,000 miles (48,280 kilometers) of gas pipeline in the United States, making it one of the country’s biggest operators. It has been trying for more than a decade to build its Keystone XL oil pipeline project linking Canada’s oil sands to U.S. refineries.
Other pipeline developers feel the same.
“Fifteen years ago nobody cared that much about pipelines, today pipelines are under siege,” said Al Monaco, president and CEO of Enbridge Inc, with over 27,000 miles of gas transmission lines in North America.
FERC in April asked stakeholders to submit comments on whether the commission should revise existing pipeline approval policies, yielding feedback from industry backers.
“I have encouraged the FERC commissioners that if they move forward in revising this (policy) they should focus on timely review and approval or disapproval of pipeline certificates,” U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, said at the World Gas Conference.
She said it was tough for firms to invest in new pipelines when “every regulatory action yields a lawsuit” that “leaves no project safe from the retroactive pulling of permits.”