The Supreme Court Approved More Drilling Under the AT | Outside Online
"The Appalachian Trail made it to Washington last week. On June 15, the Supreme Court took on a case about a contentious natural gas pipeline crossing the trail, United States Forest Service vs. Cowpasture River Association. On a 7-2 vote, they overturned a ruling from the Fourth Circuit court of Appeals and decided that, based on the Mineral Rights Act, which allows for government-sanctioned extraction on public land, the Forest Service could grant Dominion Energy the right to run the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) under the Appalachian Trail in the George Washington National Forest.
The proposed pipeline would move 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day from the gas-rich Marcellus Shale of West Virginia to southern North Carolina. Its planned route—600 miles of three-and-a-half-foot pipe—would cross the AT 34 times. According to the Cornell Legal Information Institute, “Building the pipeline would require clearing trees in a 125-foot right-of-way through the national forests, blasting mountain ridgelines to flatten the terrain, and digging a ditch to bury the pipeline.”
Dominion and their partner in the project, Duke Energy, said that the AT shouldn’t be a 2,200-mile barrier to progress, and that other pipelines already cross the trail more than 30 times.
Opponents point out that no pipeline has been built since the land became a national park unit in 1968, and that it’s irrational to cut through a swath of geologically fragile, slide-prone, federally protected endangered species habitat for the sake of a poorly planned pipeline. They say ratepayers will be on the hook for a boondoggle of a project that ballooned up to $8 million in cost, and that was unnecessary to begin with—natural gas supply in the area already outweighs demand."
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