Federal Appeals Court Approves Major Pipeline Project for Northeast Pa.

• Susan Phillips
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  Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

Efforts by environmentalists to block an interstate natural gas pipeline project in northeastern Pennsylvania have been rejected by a federal appeals court. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that federal regulators properly permitted the Marc 1 Hub line for Bradford, Sullivan, and Lycoming counties.
A group of residents, along with the Pennsylvania chapter of the Sierra Club, and a national environmental law firm, joined together to oppose the 39-mile interstate pipeline project. The Marc 1 Hub pipeline is named after the Marcellus Shale. It would connect three major interstate pipelines that already haul gas from the Gulf Coast to the major east coast markets of New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia.
NEPA Residents Seek to Halt Major Pipeline Project
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Because it’s an interstate pipeline, it needed approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC. FERC approved the pipeline project last November.
Earthjustice, the law firm that represents residents who oppose the project, appealed FERC’s decision. Environmentalists sought to halt the construction of the pipeline, in part, to stall natural gas development in places like Sullivan County, where gas drilling has not yet developed as extensively as in places like Bradford County.
The group of local residents, backed by environmental groups, wanted FERC to do a more extensive, environmental impact study. And they had the support of the Environmental Protection Agency, which agreed that a better study is needed, one that would look at the cumulative effect of all the new pipelines planned for the region’s undeveloped stretches of forest. But the three-judge panel rejected that argument, saying federal regulators had done a sufficient review of the impacts, and that larger environmental consequences of natural gas development aided by the pipeline project, should not be considered a deciding factor.
FERC did conduct a less extensive environmental assessment that concluded the ecological impact would not be significant. The controversial project, proposed by Central New York Oil and Gas, whose parent company is Inergy, will cross about 100 waterways, and require the clear cutting of tens of thousands of trees.
 

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