Antis Proud of Hassling Mountain Valley Pipeline with 57 Lawsuits
It’s “mission accomplished” for anti-fossil fuel zealots who say even if the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) from Wetzel County, WV to Pittsylvania County, VA gets completed (now 94% done), their constant lawsuits and hassling of the project has ensured no one else in their right mind will attempt another big pipeline project like MVP–ever again. At least not in the northeast. How sad when evil triumphs over good, when Big Green can corrupt and abuse our court system by launching frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit (at least 57 of them) to stop a legal, righteous, and much-needed pipeline like MVP.
The stenographers at the Roanoke Times are trumpeting the puffed-up boasting of anti-fossil fuel zealots and their foreign-funded lawsuits against MVP:
While cutting a 303-mile-long scar along the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia, the construction of a natural gas pipeline has also left a long trail of litigation with no end in sight.
Four years ago, after the first trees were felled and a 125-foot-wide strip of land was cleared for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, lawsuits by environmental groups soon followed. A federal appeals court has struck down enough government permits to delay — but not to kill, at least so far — the $6.2 billion project.
Three new legal challenges were filed in the past month. Since 2017, there have been at least 56 civil actions brought in state and federal courts in Virginia.
“Mountain Valley Pipeline has faced an unusually high volume of litigation because it is an unusually unwise and unneeded project,” said Gillian Giannetti, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Judges have pondered a host of issues: The actions of regulatory bodies, environmental damage caused by digging trenches to bury the 42-inch diameter pipe, the rights of the landowners who refused to sell their property to Mountain Valley, the fate of endangered species and claims that the project is not needed and will worsen climate change.
“The volume is definitely higher than average, but I think it’s warranted,” Giannetti said.
Many of the lawsuits have been filed and financed by a coalition of national, state and community environmental groups — from heavyweights such as the Sierra Club to local groups like Preserve Craig County.
Even if this pipeline survives, opponents say their legal battle will not be a lost cause.
“You haven’t seen another huge, several hundred mile pipeline proposed since Mountain Valley,” said Giannetti, whose national nonprofit based in New York is not a plaintiff in the cases.
Developers know that a similar venture today would be met by “an army” of opposition, she said.
Mountain Valley says there is a public need for the 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas that will be shipped through the pipeline each day, once it goes into service this summer. The joint venture of five energy companies also argues that environmental problems with muddy runoff from construction sites have been addressed with its new set of permits.
“Aside from the number of challenges and litigation efforts by the opposition, the fact is that total project work on the MVP is roughly 94% complete,” company spokeswoman Natalie Cox wrote in an email last week.
But key decisions are expected soon from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — which in the past has been a burial ground for permits granted to Mountain Valley.
“At the end of the day, this pipeline continues to be in serious legal jeopardy,” Giannetti said.
Perhaps the most litigated — and for opponents, the most lucrative — aspect of construction has been the way Mountain Valley has tried to run the pipe beneath streams and wetlands. There are nearly 1,000 such crossings along the pipeline’s path from northern West Virginia, through the New River and Roanoke valleys, to connect with an existing pipeline near the North Carolina line.
Mountain Valley says it has completed more than half of the crossings with no adverse affects.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers granted the company a Nationwide Permit 12 in early 2018, which critics said took a “one size fits all” approach to temporarily damming waterways and burying the pipe along the exposed bottom. A three-judge panel of Fourth Circuit threw out that approval, ruling that the government cut corners in a way that favored Mountain Valley.
A second Nationwide Permit 12 was issued in September 2019, only to be stayed by the appeallate court two months later.
Sensing that its coveted blanket permit was doomed, Mountain Valley decided to seek an individual permit, which involves a more detailed analysis of each crossing. As part of that process, Virginia and West Virginia needed to grant water quality certifications before the federal government could take action.
Virginia’s State Water Control Board voted 3-2 last month to do so, and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection followed suit two weeks later.
And once again, both states were sued.
Last week, the Sierra Club and seven other groups asked the Fourth Circuit to stay the Virginia permit until reaches a final decision on their latest legal challenge. A decision on that request is expected by the end of January.
In seeking a stay, the groups argued that Mountain Valley intends to “ramp up” construction in February and would otherwise be done with the project before the court could rule.
Delaying the permit would allow time for a full examination of plans to trench and blast through streams, which the motion says would cause “irreparable harm” to the environment.
The State Water Control Board, according to the groups, failed to consider alternative locations for the water body crossings, wrongly concluding that it lacked the authority to do so.
Mountain Valley has made so many conflicting statements in the past about the best locations and methods to ford across streams and wetlands that it no longer has any credibility, attorneys for the groups contend.
“In short, MVP has a demonstrated history of saying whatever it needs to say about alternative crossing methods in order to gain approval of its preferred methods,” the motion states.
The Fourth Circuit has given Mountain Valley until Tuesday to respond to the arguments.
In an email Friday, Cox wrote that “if the opponents were truly interested in environmental protection, they would have engaged with us to address their concerns through honest, open dialogue, which we respectfully offered on numerous occasions, rather than wasting agency resources and burdening the courts to support their myopic agendas.”
In addition to the motion for a stay, the Fourth Circuit has other pipeline business before it.
Last October, the same three-judge panel that has rejected earlier permits heard arguments in two cases. One is a challenge of a U.S. Forest Service permit that allows the pipeline to pass through 3.5 miles of the Jefferson National Forest in Giles and Montgomery counties. The other asks the court to reverse a finding by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which concluded that running a pipeline across steep mountain slopes and through pristine steams would not jeopardize endangered species such as the Roanoke logperch and the candy darter.
Written opinions are expected any day now.
Still more legal challenges are pending before an appellate court in Washington, D.C. In those cases, opponents are questioning decisions by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which in 2020 lifted a stop-work order and gave Mountain Valley more time to complete the project.
When it comes to fighting the powerful interests that are part of the fossil fuel industry, it helps to have the deep pockets and national profile of groups like the Sierra Club, Giannetti said.
“There are people in California who are getting emails about how important it is to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline,” she said.