The 15.5 bcm/year Atlantic Coast gas pipeline project in North Carolina (United States) has suffered another setback as the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals has denied requests to reconsider its previous ruling, which rejected a federal permit allowing the project to pass through a major hiking trail and two national forests. The project operator Dominion Energy has raised the possibility of appealing the decision to the US Supreme Court but this option would delay the project completion until 2021 and raise the pipeline costs by an additional US$250m to US$7.75bn.
This is not the first setback for the project, which was halted over serious environmental concerns. The in-service date has already been pushed from the end of 2019 to mid-2020 due to regulatory hurdles and construction delays.
The 972 km long Atlantic Coast gas pipeline would deliver fracked gas from the West Virginia producing assets to North Carolina and Virginia. It would improve gas supply to eastern states, where the population growth and the replacement of ageing coal-fired power plants with a new fleet of gas-fired plants are expected to significantly increase gas demand over the next two decades. The project is developed by a joint venture of Dominion Atlantic Coast Pipeline (Dominion Resources, 48%), Duke Energy ACP (40%), Piedmont NACP Company (a subsidiary of Duke Energy, 7%) and Maple Enterprise Holdings (an affiliate of Southern Company, 5%).