FERC votes to suspend new gas project review policies, seeks comments

The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission voted March 24 to suspend the effectiveness of two new gas project review policies, converting them to draft status and seeking additional public comment.

The policies, issued a month earlier, had drawn strong objections from the natural gas sector, Republican lawmakers and from Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Joe Manchin, Democrat-West Virginia.

FERC also agreed not to apply the policy statements to already pending gas project applications and voted to approve the certificates for three such projects.

Those included: the 1.1 Bcf/d Evangeline Pass Expansion project, which would help supply the Plaquemines LNG export facility; Columbia Gulf Transmission's 725 MMcf/d East Lateral XPress project, also supplying Plaquemines LNG, and Iroquois Gas Transmission System's 125 MMcf/d Enhancement by Compression project in Connecticut and New York.

The new policies, issued Feb. 17, would update FERC's 1999 gas certificate policy by looking beyond precedent agreements to establish whether projects are needed and would affirm that environmental impacts such as climate change would factor into FERC's decisions on whether to approve projects. In addition, FERC had issued an interim policy for considering GHG emissions.