Commissioner James Danly Statement
April 8, 2022
Docket No. CP21-57-000
I concur with today’s order granting the amendment authorization requested by Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC (Mountain Valley).[1] I write separately to express two points.
First, as I previously stated,[2] while not fatal to this order’s durability, I would have explicitly repudiated Northern Natural Gas Company[3] and reaffirmed the Commission’s prior position that “[w]ithout an accepted methodology, the Commission cannot make a finding whether a particular quantity of greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions poses a significant impact on the environment, whether directly or cumulatively with other sources, and how that impact would contribute to climate change.”[4] This is because, as the Commission has stated, it is unable to connect a particular project’s GHG emissions to discrete, physical effects on the environment.[5] The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) has found similarly.[6] And the Commission’s now-draft Interim GHG Policy Statement[7] does not alter these determinations.[8] One can also not help but notice the Commission’s mention of Mountain Valley’s “carbon offset plan.”[9]
Second, regarding the inclusion of a calculation of the Social Cost of Carbon from the project’s emissions,[10] the Commission has provided extensive discussion on why the use of the Social Cost of Carbon is not appropriate in project-level NEPA review, and why it cannot meaningfully inform the Commission’s decisions on natural gas infrastructure projects under the Natural Gas Act.[11] Nothing can be gleaned from the numbers calculated by Commission staff in today’s order.
For these reasons, I respectfully concur.
[1] See Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC, 179 FERC ¶ 61,013 (2022) (Mountain Valley).
[2] See, e.g., Iroquois Gas Transmission Sys., L.P., 178 FERC ¶ 61,200 (2022) (Danly, Comm’r, concurring in the judgment at PP 3-5).
[3] See Mountain Valley, 179 FERC ¶ 61,013 at P 48 n.84 (citing N. Nat. Gas Co., 174 FERC ¶ 61,189 (2021)).
[4] Dominion Transmission, Inc., 163 FERC ¶ 61,128, at P 67 (2018) (citation omitted).
[5] See, e.g., Nat’l Fuel Gas Supply Corp., 158 FERC ¶ 61,145, at P 188 (2017).
[6] See CEQ, Draft [National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)] Guidance on Consideration of the Effects of Climate Change and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, at P 3 (Feb. 18, 2010), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ceq/20100218-nepa-consideration-effects-ghg-draft-guidance.pdf (“it is not currently useful for the NEPA analysis to attempt to link specific climatological changes, or the environmental impacts thereof, to the particular project or emissions, as such direct linkage is difficult to isolate and to understand.”).
[7] Consideration of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Nat. Gas Infrastructure Project Reviews, 178 FERC ¶ 61,108 (2022) (Interim GHG Policy Statement); see Certification of New Interstate Nat. Gas Facilities, 178 FERC ¶ 61,197 (2022) (converting the recent policy statements to drafts).
[8] See Interim GHG Policy Statement, 178 FERC ¶ 61,108 (Danly, Comm’r, dissenting at P 22) (“And while it is not acknowledged at all in the Interim Policy Statement’s procedural history, the Commission has repeatedly stated that ‘it cannot determine a project’s incremental physical impacts on the environment caused by GHG emissions,’ and CEQ has made similar statements.”) (citations omitted).
[9] See Mountain Valley, 179 FERC ¶ 61,013 at P 47 (“We note that, in July 2021, Mountain Valley announced its carbon offset plan, by which it would purchase carbon offsets that are expected to be equivalent to 90% of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with operations of the Mountain Valley Pipeline Project over a 10-year period.”) (citation omitted).
[10] See id. P 54.
[11] See, e.g., Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC, 161 FERC ¶ 61,043, at P 296 (2017), order on reh’g, 163 FERC ¶ 61,197, at PP 275-97 (2018), aff’d sub nom. Appalachian Voices v. FERC, No. 17-1271, 2019 WL 847199, at *2 (D.C. Cir. 2019) (“[The Commission] gave several reasons why it believed petitioners’ preferred metric, the Social Cost of Carbon tool, is not an appropriate measure of project-level climate change impacts and their significance under NEPA or the Natural Gas Act. That is all that is required for NEPA purposes.”).