More Mountain Valley gas line permits suspended

The US Army Corps of Engineers has suspended water crossing authorizations in two counties of West Virginia for the 1.9 Bcf/d (54mn m³/d) Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline project.

The $4.6bn project is already under a water crossings construction stoppage in other parts of the state after a federal court earlier this month threw out in its entirety a permit that allowed hundreds of crossings in the Army Corps' Huntington district. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in that ruling said the Army Corps had erred by authorizing a "dry cut" river-crossing construction method that would take up to six weeks, when the permit should have limited construction time to 72 hours.

The Army Corps late last week said it has suspended the project's permits in the corps' Pittsburgh district as a result of the federal court's ruling in the Huntington district permits, saying that because 1,119 water crossing verifications are currently suspended along the majority of the 303-mile (488km) pipeline route in that district, the corps finds it appropriate to also suspend the Pittsburgh district crossings. The suspended Pittsburgh district permits covered 59 stream crossings and 62 wetland crossings in Wetzel and Harrison counties, West Virginia.

Project developer EQT yesterday notified the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that the project has already suspended construction of new pipeline crossings of the waters of the US in the Army Corps' Pittsburgh district, and no US waters crossings there are currently under construction.

Mountain Valley pipeline is designed to ship gas produced from the Marcellus shale to markets along the east coast, and is scheduled to begin service in the fourth quarter of 2019. EQT in September boosted the line's cost estimate by one-fourth on construction halts from federal and state regulators.