WASHINGTON (WV News) — Work on the Mountain Valley Pipeline project is expected to restart “soon,” according to its developers, following authorization Wednesday from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
While supporters are celebrating the news as the culmination of a years-long effort, environmental groups say it is the latest in a series of regulatory and legal failures related to the project.
“Through their own failures alone, the Mountain Valley Pipeline should never be completed,” said Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous. “The unnecessary project has repeatedly been unable to comply with bedrock environmental laws and should never have been used as a tool in must-pass legislation to hold our country hostage or capitulate to special interests willing to destroy the planet for their own profits.”
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who worked to have mandates for the project’s completion included in the Fiscal Responsibility act of 2023, said FERC’s announcement is the “final step needed to get MVP finished and up-and-running.”
“MVP is vital to America’s energy and national security and will benefit not only Wast Virginia, but the entire nation,” Manchin said in a Tweet.
The nonprofit group Appalachian Voices called FERC’s decision “foolhardy.”
“We know that the MVP cannot be built in compliance with our nation’s bedrock environmental laws — which is why the company and its supporters went to the extraordinary length of having Congress attempt to sidestep them,” said Peter Anderson, the group’s Virginia policy director. “We will continue to stand by community members and hold MVP LLC accountable using any and all available means.”
Charlie Burd, executive director of the Gas and Oil Association of West Virginia, said FERC’s approval was the “final hurdle” to the resumption of construction following years of setbacks.
“It’s great news, I think, for West Virginia — for West Virginia producers, West Virginia residents and for end-users at the end of the pipeline, once the pipeline is completed, that will be getting some of the cleanest natural gas produced any place in the world,” he said.
Provisions in the Fiscal Responsibility Act mandated completion of the MVP project specifically, and do not apply to energy projects generally.
Manchin, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and Rep. Carol Miller, R-W.Va., have all supported efforts to pass legislation overhauling the permitting process for federal energy projects.
Industry stakeholders still hope to see such a bill passed, Burd said.
“The efforts led by Senators Manchin and Capito, with support from Representative Carol Miller, to devise a permitting process that has specific timelines and specific protocols in place once a permit is filled and the due diligence of that permit is assessed by the regulatory bodies — I just believe that is an appropriate approach as we move forward in this country,” Burd said. “Not only to develop natural gas pipelines, but also pipelines that would be transporting hydrogen and other commodities that take us into a more net-zero carbon world.”
In a response filed in the Fourth Circuit of Appeals, the Wilderness Society, represented by Southern Environmental Law Center, argues the provisions of the Fiscal Responsibility Act dismissing current legal challenges to the project violate “important separation of powers principles central to our Constitution and American system of government.”
“Mountain Valley could not build their pipeline in compliance with the law, so they appealed to Congress to interfere with the courts, skirting both our legal system and Constitution,” said Chase Huntley, vice president of strategy and policy at The Wilderness Society, in a press release.