After near miss in court on GHG considerations, debate endures at FERC

摘要

A key appeals court ruling last week looks unlikely to bridge the division at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission over environmental reviews in pipeline cases. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals Tuesday upheld on procedural grounds FERC orders in a case testing the agency’s greenhouse gas considerations in natural gas pipeline reviews, but the court expressed “misgivings” about FERC’s “decidedly less-than-dogged” efforts to obtain information for its National Environmental Policy Act review. In Lori Birckhead, et al., v. FERC (18-1218), a three-judge panel concluded it lacked jurisdiction to rule based on those misgivings. The petitioners failed to raise questions at the appropriate time about the effort to seek information needed, the court said. FERC’s approach to weighing indirect GHG emissions associated with gas projects has divided commissioners, adding uncertainty about FERC’s ability to issue the certificate orders that projects need to advance. At issue in the case was Tennessee Gas Pipeline’s Broad Run Expansion, a compression project which would add 200,000 Dt/d of capacity for moving Appalachian shale gas to Southeast US markets. The petitioners questioned whether FERC’s orders ran counter to the court’s findings in Sierra Club v. FERC, a case involving the Sabal Trail Transmission pipeline, by failing to consider upstream and downstream GHG emissions.