In re Constitution Pipeline Co., LLC

Five requests for rehearing were filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) seeking rescission of its approval of a 124-mile gas pipeline between Pennsylvania and New York. The requests for rehearing charged that FERC committed a number of errors in its review of the pipeline, including failures to fully consider the project’s environmental impacts. For example, Catskill Mountainkeeper and other organizations charged that the environmental review should have considered the indirect impacts of additional gas production and that it had not fully considered the project’s greenhouse gas emissions. Among the alleged insufficiencies related to the project’s greenhouse gas emissions were failure to consider cumulative impacts, failure to consider the impact of the elimination of carbon sinks such as forests and wetlands, and failure to properly incorporate the social cost of carbon into the impact analysis. Catskill Mountainkeeper also accused FERC of improperly minimizing the significance of the project’s greenhouse gas emissions by comparing them to global emissions. Concern regarding the assessment of greenhouse gas emissions was echoed in other requests for rehearing, including it the request submitted by Stop the Pipeline, which took issue with the project sponsor’s assertion that natural gas would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.