A recent Millennium Pipeline decision slamming New York DEC was a needed move by FERC to protect its Federal jurisdiction but Congress needs to act as well.

FERC issued a key and very welcome decision on September 15, 2017 when it held that the State of New York, by its passive aggressive handling of a Clean Water Act (CWA) Section 401 Certification, had waived its authority to issue the Certification. FERC here slaps down on states treating CWA certifications as political footballs to veto pipeline infrastructure projects without regard to law or facts but based on politics and pressure by ideological anti-natural gas interest groups.

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This FERC decision here involves the 7.8-mile Millennium Valley Lateral pipeline which is intended to serve the 680 MW gas-fired CPV Valley Energy Center in Wayawanda, Orange County, NY, currently under construction. FERC had granted the Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity for the line on November 9, 2016 conditioned upon receipt or waiver of State CWA §401 certification.

Millennium had filed its Section 401 application with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) in November 2015. NYSDEC slow walked the application issuing various further demands and moving the goal post further away.  It neither granted nor denied the certification. The federal CWA strikes a federal-state balance by requiring a state to grant or deny a CWA certification for a federal jurisdictional project within one year of receipt of the application. If that has not happened then the law provides that the state has waived its rights under Section 401 to further review the project under the federal CWA.

In July 2017 Millennium wisely asked FERC to declare that the State of New York had waived its authority to issue or deny a water quality certification. While Millennium’s request to FERC was pending, NYSDEC, realizing the pickle it was in, issued on August 30, 2017–one day before NYSDEC’s contended one-year deadline– a two-page letter (signed by the General Counsel of NYSDEC), which supposedly denied “conditionally” the Millennium water quality certification.

Read more:

http://naturalgasnow.org/ferc-slams-state-overreach-pipelines-congr...