Chairman Richard Glick & Commissioner Allison Clements Joint Statement
July 15, 2021
Docket No. CP20-466-001
Order: C-2
We concur in today’s order addressing the arguments raised on rehearing but write separately to reaffirm our view that the Commission should reconsider Shell U.S. Gas & Power, LLC (Shell), which held that a facility must be connected to a pipeline to be a jurisdictional LNG terminal.[1]
There is nothing in the plain language of section 3 of the Natural Gas Act (NGA)[2] or section 2(11), which defines “LNG terminal,”[3] that says or implies that a facility must be connected to a pipeline to fall within our jurisdiction under the NGA.[4] If we simply construed the actual text of the statute, we would not need to engage in this tortured analysis regarding what constitutes a pipeline. We reiterate that the Commission should revisit Shell to ensure that we are carrying out our statutory responsibilities and to provide clarity and certainty to all parties.
For these reasons, we respectfully concur.
[1] Shell U.S. Gas & Power, LLC, 148 FERC ¶ 61,163, P 43 (2014).
[2] 15 U.S.C. § 717b.
[3] 15 U.S.C. § 717a(11).
[4] See Lomax v. Ortiz‐Marquez, 140 S. Ct. 1721, 1725 (2020) (“[T]his Court may not narrow a provision’s reach by inserting words Congress chose to omit.”); Virginia Uranium, Inc. v. Warren, 139 S. Ct. 1894, 1900 (2019) (plurality opinion) (The Court’s “duty [is] to respect not only what Congress wrote but, as importantly, what it didn’t write.”).