West Virginia DEP oversteps FERC and decides to vacate the already twice approved Mountain Valley Pipeline and revoke the 401 certification.

As we have noted in our prior blog posts on the Constitution Pipeline and Millennium Valley Lateral projects, §401 of the Federal Clean Water Act has become a focal point in the growing efforts by States to exercise dominant authority over FERC jurisdictional pipelines.

This time, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (“WVDEP”) has taken the unprecedented step of actually revoking a §401 certification it had granted in March 2017 and then reaffirmed in May. This action by WVDEP may be the final straw in State authority to review FERC jurisdictional pipelines as FERC and the Congress will be energized to react to the oversteps by New York in Millennium and now West Virginia in Mountain Valley.

The facts in the Mountain Valley case are quite egregious. WVDEP, with a public press release, approved the §401 certification. Then, just two months later, it denied requests for reconsideration by Sierra Club and others of its decision to grant the certification. Sierra Club and other NGOs, conceding that the WVDEP decision was final, appealed the certification to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals just last month.

Read more:

http://naturalgasnow.org/west-virginia-dep-revokes-twice-approved-mountain-valley-certification/