Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

…

…

The developer of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, Dominion Energy, says it’s just begun to fight and intends to win and win soon in its bid to complete it.

Jim Willis, over at the invaluable Marcellus Drilling News, reported yesterday on some highly encouraging remarks made by Donald Raikes, a Senior Vice President with Dominion Energy’s Gas Infrastructure Group. Dominion Energy is the developer of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline that will help move Appalachian shale gas to market, crossing much of Virginia and, in the process, the Appalachian Trail.

Forest Service permits issued for a crossing of the trail were undone in a stupendously stupid decision by three highly political judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Another separate Fourth Circuit decision threw up other obstacles. Dominion, though, expects to dispense with all this nonsense in court. 

Judge Thacker

Some of our readers will recall the Fourth Circuit’s idiocy, reflected in these remarks by the opinion’s author, Judge Stephanie Dawn Thacker, who actually delivered these not-so-legal remarks as part of her rationale:

We trust the United States Forest Service to “speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.” Dr. Seuss, The Lorax (1971).

Yes, Judge Thacker trusts the Forest Service; except, of course, when they do something that disagrees with her own aesthetic values and “scenic integrity objectives.”

This is the kind of elitist view of the world found inside that part of it occupied by too much of our ruling class. The Forest Service describes its mission as follows and there is no mention of “speaking for the trees,” but Thacker has inartfully projected her own childish Lorax views onto the mission.

The agency’s mission is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.

How do you fight this crap? Well, you get in the arena and fight it out and that’s what the Atlantic Coast folks are doing. Here’s some of what Dominion’s folks are promising, according to an article from S&P Global Platts:

Dominion Energy expects to win one of two legal challenges its Atlantic Coast Pipeline faces within the next four to six weeks and be able to resume construction on a portion of the 600-mile route after that, an executive said Tuesday.

Donald Raikes, senior vice president for gas transmission operations in Dominion’s Gas Infrastructure Group, added that he believes the US Supreme Court will agree to hear the second legal challenge, involving a permit to cross the Appalachian Trail, and ultimately rule in the operator’s favor, allowing it to complete the project.

The optimism comes as Dominion holds to its current timeline to begin partial service in late 2020 and full service in early 2021. The up-to-$7.5 billion project has been beset by delays and cost increases, largely because of opposition from environmental groups that has resulted in the legal challenges. Atlantic Coast Pipeline is among several Northeast gas infrastructure projects designed to boost takeaway capacity from the Appalachian Basin that have been delayed or stalled because of regulatory and legal hurdles.

“This is not about Duke, or Dominion or Southern,” Raikes said at the LDC Gas Forums conference in Boston. “This is about the industry. This is about all of us.”

…The federal government is expected to back with its own appeal Dominion’s Supreme Court appeal of a 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals decision that invalidated US Forest Service authorizations for the project to cross the Appalachian Trail…

During a separate presentation at the conference, Dan Diefenbach, manager of facility planning and design for Dominion Energy Transmission, said 35 miles of the pipeline are now in the ground in West Virginia and North Carolina.

Persistence, persistence, persistence…

God Bless Dominion!