“There are positive things coming out of the Biden administration on the verbiage side…but if you look at the actions, they fall short,” Continental President and CEO Bill Berry said during a recent panel discussion.
Cyprus, Israel and Greece have been considering a pipeline connecting east Mediterranean gas discoveries to Europe, but the project took a setback when the U.S. pulled its political support for the project in January.
Several senators from natural gas producing states, including Democrat Joe Manchin and Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, had called on FERC to kill the policy.
Mitch McConnell, the U.S. Senate’s top Republican, wants FERC to rescind rules it just issued in February that require pipeline project reviews to weigh the direct and indirect impacts of GHG emissions.
Environmental groups claim to have obtained an agreement from New Fortress to allow the proposed LNG plant’s air quality permit to expire in July, effectively halting the project in north-central Pennsylvania.
Glick insists that tougher reviews of infrastructure projects on the front end will enable permit approvals to survive court challenges.
The Keystone XL pipeline would have carried 830,000 bbl/d of Canadian crude from Alberta to U.S. refineries but ran years of regulatory delays and fierce environmental opposition before ultimately being scrapped.
Trans Mountain now expects to finish the expansion in the third quarter of 2023, when it will nearly triple the capacity of the pipeline running from Alberta to the Pacific Coast to 890,000 bbl/d of oil.
After 21 rounds of bidding, combined live bids for the six leases stood at nearly $1.54 billion, according to updates posted on the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's web site.
The latest move by FERC that would require permits for the construction of natural gas infrastructure to involve projections of emissions from construction, operation and users of transported gas, will likely be tested in the courts.