Developers of the Mountain Valley Pipeline have revised their planned in-service date for the 303-mile natural gas project from West Virginia into Southern Virginia, saying they now hope to begin operating it in “early June.”
On April 22, the pipeline’s joint venture company sent a request to the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission to authorize the pipeline’s operation by May 23, with a goal of placing it in service by June 1. The commission regulates the construction of interstate pipelines.
This week, the company sent a letter to FERC changing its targeted in-service date to “early June,” citing “the extended construction duration to achieve weld-out, which has been associated with weather and environmental protection.”
“Mountain Valley will supplement its Request when its facilities are mechanically complete. Mountain Valley requests that Commission Staff issue its authorization within one day of such notification,” the company said in its letter dated Tuesday.
The original request was based on May 23 being one day after the pipeline’s expected completion date at the time.
The $7.85 billion, 42-inch-diameter Mountain Valley Pipeline is designed to transport up to 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas daily from West Virginia through six Virginia counties, ending at a Transco compressor station in Pittsylvania County. The project was first announced in 2014 with an anticipated completion date of 2018 and a price tag of $3.5 billion but has been delayed for years by legal and permitting challenges.
Supporters of the pipeline say it will meet demand for natural gas, and their efforts were aided this past summer by Congress fast-tracking the project’s completion. Opponents say the pipeline is unnecessary, dangerous and harmful to the environment, and they continue to resist it and its proposed $370 million extension into North Carolina.
Recently, pipeline critics have argued that it’s too early for the pipeline to go into service — or that it shouldn’t go into service at all.
Among other concerns, they cite an outstanding safety order from the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which arose out of concerns over the pipeline’s physical integrity following years of exposure to sun and weather, and the recent rupture of a section of the 42-inch-diameter pipeline in Roanoke County during hydrostatic testing, in which pressurized water was used to verify the pipe’s strength.
“Over the past decade, we have watched this reckless fossil fuel company botch the process to build a pipeline, and throw tantrums every time something doesn’t go their way,” Russell Chisholm, a Giles County resident and co-director of the Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights (POWHR) coalition, said in a statement. “MVP shamelessly accuses those of us in harm’s way of ‘mischaracterizing’ their intent to blast methane through our communities as ‘premature’ when they just blew a pipe up during testing and obscured the facts surrounding the incident.”
Among those who have formally asked FERC to hold off on putting the pipeline into service until the outstanding issues are resolved are at least 23 state lawmakers and the boards of supervisors in Montgomery and Roanoke counties.
“On May 1, 2024, the project suffered a substantial pipe failure within Roanoke County during hydrostatic testing,” Roanoke County Administrator Richard Caywood wrote on behalf of the county board in a letter to FERC posted online Wednesday. “This rather dramatic pipe failure has caused a great deal of concern among our residents who live in the area and who appropriately ask: ‘What if the pipe failed with gas rather than water?’”
Mountain Valley Pipeline has said that the pipeline rupture showed that the testing process works as intended.
“Since that time, Mountain Valley has successfully performed hydrostatic testing on additional segments, including the repaired segment where the disruption occurred, without incident,” the company wrote in a May 10 letter to FERC.
Some critics, including POWHR and the nonprofit Appalachian Voices — which recently sent FERC what it says is a petition with more than 2,200 participants — have maintained that the pipeline should never begin operating, period.
In its letter to FERC on Tuesday, Mountain Valley Pipeline said its critics have “repeatedly misinterpreted or mischaracterized” its request for in-service authorization. The company said that when it made the April 22 request, it acknowledged that construction and compliance measures remained and that it filed the request to provide transparency and advance notice to landowners and others.
“Mountain Valley did not ask for authorization before it achieves mechanical completion or before it complies with all outstanding requirements of its Consent Agreement with the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) that are necessary to commence operations,” the company wrote in its letter, which was signed by deputy general counsel Matthew Eggerding.
The Mountain Valley Pipeline joint venture consists of five companies, including Roanoke-based RGC Resources Inc., the parent company of Roanoke Gas. The joint venture’s largest single stakeholder is Equitrans Midstream, which owns nearly half of the pipeline project.
The company’s Tuesday letter provides details on the pipeline’s construction progress, including that fewer than 10 welds out of 51,000 project-wide remain and that developers have completed hydrostatic testing on 99% of the project. The company has said that the section of pipeline rupturing in Roanoke County shows that the testing process works as intended.
The company said it expects that areas impacted by construction will be “fully restored” by August, although that depends on “weather and other external factors.”
Mountain Valley Pipeline also said it continues progress toward fully complying with the pipeline safety agency’s order.