For many in Franklin County, it was The Recorder headline of the year.
“Pipeline halted”
At least until the results of the presidential election in November, the big story was the April 20 announcement that Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co. had suspended further work and spending on its $5 billion project, which would have gone through eight Franklin County towns on its route from Wright, N.Y., to Dracut.
The Northeast Energy Direct project, first announced in early 2014, ended with the company withdrawing its application on May 23. It had originally been planned with an alignment through Orange and Athol as well as Ashfield, Conway, Shelburne, Deerfield, Montague, Erving, Northfield and Warwick. But the route, which also included Plainfield and towns in Berkshire County, was altered late in 2014 to travel through southern New Hampshire instead, to avoid the public conservation land that would have involved controversy over Article 97 of the Massachusetts Constitution.
Yet the pipeline faced public opposition from the moment it was announced, with elected officials and environmental organizations adding their voices opposing the project on the grounds that it might threaten public safety and damage the environment, that it represented a further investment in fossil fuels that could lead to further climate disruption and that a 1.2 billion cubic feet a day pipeline wasn’t needed to meet local demand.
Ultimately, the company canceled it “as a result of inadequate capacity commitments from prospective customers.” It initially had said the 416-mile pipeline was needed “to help alleviate New England’s uniquely high natural gas and electricity costs caused by severely limited natural gas transportation capacity currently serving the region.”
The lack of need had been an argument made numerous times by towns along the route, by environmental groups like PipeLine Awareness Network for the Northeast and Conservation Law Foundation, and by the Franklin Regional Council of Governments, which last January filed comments with FERC:
“Because the company has failed to demonstrate sufficient need for NED to justify either the substantial adverse impacts to the environment and communities, or the taking of private and municipally owned property and state constitutionally protected parklands … the Commission should find that the project will not serve the ‘present or future convenience or necessity,’ and deny the application.”
Construction on the NED project had been slated to begin early in 2018, with completion in time for the heating season that fall.
You can reach Richie Davis at: rdavis@recorder.com
or 413-772-0261, ext. 269