Why It Is Important To Finish The Mountain Valley Pipeline

There was positive news last week on the energy infrastructure front. Specificallly, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would not reconsider a lower court decision that had allowed construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) to move forward. That denial will hopefully end a years-long saga that had kept construction of the project from being finished.

The completion of the MVP is critical to U.S. energy security. The $7.85 billion project, which had been slated for completion in the early part of 2024, is the only natural gas project under construction in the Appalachian region. Once it comes online, which developers now believe will happen this summer, the pipeline will bring clean, affordable energy to homes and businesses throughout the eastern portion of the United States.

The legal skirmish began in 2020 when a group of six landowners from Virginia initiated a lawsuit against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that challenged the agency’s eminent domain authority. The FERC had allowed pipeline developers to take private property for the 303-mile natural gas project from West Virginia into southern Virginia since the project was deemed to be “in the public interest.” The landowners sued, arguing Congress should not have given the legislative power of eminent domain to the FERC, an agency that oversees interstate pipeline construction.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision was welcome — and it was not a surprise. In December 2023, the court announced it would not temporarily stop MVP developers from constructing a section of the pipeline that runs through the landowners’ property, and in July 2023, it dismissed an injunction against the developers from a lower court, allowing construction, which to that point had been paused, to begin again.