WASHINGTON (WV News) — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Friday issued the final permit needed for the Mountain Valley Pipeline project.
With this final authorization, the long-contended pipeline project will be able to move forward, with the developers hoping to finish construction by the end of the year.
The announcement was celebrated by West Virginia’s U.S. Senate delegation.
“This announcement that the Mountain Valley Pipeline finally has all permits needed to resume construction is great news for not only West Virginia but the entire nation,” said Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.
“The Mountain Valley Pipeline is essential to ensuring our nation’s energy and national security and providing affordable, reliable natural gas to hundreds of thousands of Americans,” he said. “I am proud to have secured Mountain Valley’s approval in the recent debt ceiling legislation and am pleased to see the administration following the law and approving this vital project.
“The construction of this pipeline has been caught up in America’s broken permitting process for far too long, and I look forward to the day this important piece of energy infrastructure is up-and-running.”
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., also celebrated the announcement.
“The Mountain Valley Pipeline is set to receive its final Sec. 404 permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers!” she said in a tweet Friday afternoon.
“This critical step forward is because of a provision I helped include in the Fiscal Responsibility Act that will expedite the MVP’s completion,” she said in the tweet.
An accelerated timeline for permit approval for the pipeline project was included in the debt ceiling bill signed into law by President Joe Biden earlier this month.
It also dismissed several ongoing legal challenges to various permits for the pipeline which have been among the major obstacles to the project’s completion.
The project was initially started in 2014. Equitrans Midstream, MVP’s developers, said at the time the pipeline was expected to be completed by the end of 2018 at an overall cost of around $3.5 billion.
The company recently said the current estimated total cost is approximately $6.6 billion.
“There are approximately 20 linear miles of construction remaining, and Mountain Valley continues to target project completion for year-end 2023,” said Natalie Cox, director of communications and corporate affairs for project developers Equitrans Midstream Corp., in an email to WV News earlier this week.
According to information from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Section 404 of the Clean Water Act establishes a program to regulate the discharge of dredged or fill material into waters of the United States, including wetlands.
Activities in waters of the United States regulated under the program include fill for development, water resource projects (such as dams and levees), infrastructure development (such as highways and airports) and mining projects.
Section 404 requires a permit before dredged or fill material may be discharged into waters of the United States, unless the activity is exempt from Section 404 regulation (e.g., certain farming and forestry activities).
The project is also ready to proceed from the state perspective in West Virginia. Last week Gov. Jim Justice announced the state Department of Environmental Protection had issued the final state-level permit needed.
“To the best of my ability, I’m not aware of anything else that is another step that people are waiting on,” Justice said at the time. “If there be another step, we’ll be on it. I believe that construction has the possibility of starting real, real, real soon.”
The project is a natural gas transmission pipeline planned to span approximately 303 miles from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia.
It will transport natural gas from the Mountain State to markets in the Mid-Atlantic and South Atlantic regions.
In West Virginia, the MVP’s route is planned to include Braxton, Doddridge, Fayette, Greenbrier, Harrison, Lewis, Monroe, Nicholas, Summers, Webster and Wetzel counties.