[Original post February 22, 2012. Bullet at top (•) marks update Februrary 23, 2012.]
• As forecast below — and if reports flowing Feb. 23 from in-the-loop landowners are reliable, which I think they are — El Paso-TGP's pipeline plan has been put on indefinite hold in the wake of the Cabot-Williams announcement. This leaves hopeful Upstate landowners, and skittish others, to await presentations from Cabot-Williams, which — contrary to media reports — have not yet actually been made. TGP's details are still relevant mainly to the extent that they generally frame this sort of project's economic impact, infrastructural need, and approximate routing.
The announcement yesterday that Cabot Oil and Gas had joined with Williams Partners on a 25-75 joint venture to connect the burgeoning Marcellus Shale Gas Fields of NEPA with high-demand East Coast markets — by a pipeline interconnect running deep into NY's Leatherstocking Region — is already generating significant confusion among Upstate media, town officials, and landowners.
First of all, Cabot-Williams' "Constitution Pipeline" is the second similar-sounding proposal to breech the surface of media coverage over the last two days. The first — originally publicized by landowner-oriented computer forums, and this blog — was put forth without a press release by El Paso subsidiary Tennessee Gas Pipeline, and is labeled on that company's maps as "Northeast Exchange."
Both lines have roughly the same beginning and end points, and both must traverse generally the same rural terrain from PA's Northern Tier, through NY's Southern Tier, and on into NY's Leatherstocking Region. But they're not one and the same proposal, and they're not being proposed by one and the same developer.
In fact, Cabot-Williams officials have reported their agents have not yet been on the ground, talking to town officials or landowners. According to landowners, TGP agents have been on the ground, since mid-February.
There is a fierce private-sector competition going on here — and I do admit that that can make things complicated, and ripe for controversy.
But look at the errors already: Albany public radio station WAMC today is broadcasting a seven-and-a-half-minute-long interview with Schoharie Town Supervisor Gene Milone — embedded on their web page alongside wire service copy on the Cabot-Williams announcement — in which the audibly riled local official recounts his so-far-disconcerting dealings... with TGP.
Both WAMC and Milone appear to have missed the fact that TGP is not Cabot-Williams, and vice versa, and that whatever routing maps TGP has displayed in-person so far are unlikely to align with whatever the other developer puts together.
[I noticed as of Feb. 24 that WAMC's text was corrected, but without acknowledging any error.]
Similarly, Steve Reilly of the Binghamton Press ran the Cabot-Williams announcement as though it represented a second pipeline destined to criss-cross the Valley of Opportunity, joining several additional on-paper or underway projects which are intended to run north only as far as the Southern Tier's Millennium Pipeline.
I conclude, however, that the Cabot-Williams thing represents a second proposal for fulfilling the same single infrastructural need.
Not yet comprehended is that, in the end, there's only going to be one of these pipelines built (unless all the economic plusses of construction must again be snuffed out by the fates of the market, or by anti-development activism, the latter of which New York State is already over-supplied). Under the American system of both intrastate and interstate energy transmission, capitalists are forcibly restrained by the "public interest" from building whatever they cotton to — whether pipeline or powerline. In either PA-NY interconnect case, which will be an interstate case, publicly employed specialists at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will be fully empowered through a mind-numbingly involved process to make the ultimate decisions regarding "public need," and other issues, before construction.
Just that part is likely to take nearly two years.
Upstate media people — rather than immediately seeking to rally the forces of NIMBYism, as is their reflexive habit — should instead be reporting all the facts, getting them straight, and asking such fundamental questions as whether TGP's plan will soon have to be quietly withdrawn as dead in the water, given that leading NEPA natural gas producer $COG is on board with the other plan.
Though either pipeline would be likely to go somewhere through Schoharie Township — because that place is pretty close to the intended interconnects with the already-built TGP 200 west-east line, and the already-built Iroquois Gas Transmission northwest-southeast line — the situation is way too premature to be making panicky phone calls to landowners regarding parcel-specific crossings, as the Schoharie town super has already done.
The announcement yesterday that Cabot Oil and Gas had joined with Williams Partners on a 25-75 joint venture to connect the burgeoning Marcellus Shale Gas Fields of NEPA with high-demand East Coast markets — by a pipeline interconnect running deep into NY's Leatherstocking Region — is already generating significant confusion among Upstate media, town officials, and landowners.
First of all, Cabot-Williams' "Constitution Pipeline" is the second similar-sounding proposal to breech the surface of media coverage over the last two days. The first — originally publicized by landowner-oriented computer forums, and this blog — was put forth without a press release by El Paso subsidiary Tennessee Gas Pipeline, and is labeled on that company's maps as "Northeast Exchange."
Both lines have roughly the same beginning and end points, and both must traverse generally the same rural terrain from PA's Northern Tier, through NY's Southern Tier, and on into NY's Leatherstocking Region. But they're not one and the same proposal, and they're not being proposed by one and the same developer.
In fact, Cabot-Williams officials have reported their agents have not yet been on the ground, talking to town officials or landowners. According to landowners, TGP agents have been on the ground, since mid-February.
There is a fierce private-sector competition going on here — and I do admit that that can make things complicated, and ripe for controversy.
But look at the errors already: Albany public radio station WAMC today is broadcasting a seven-and-a-half-minute-long interview with Schoharie Town Supervisor Gene Milone — embedded on their web page alongside wire service copy on the Cabot-Williams announcement — in which the audibly riled local official recounts his so-far-disconcerting dealings... with TGP.
Both WAMC and Milone appear to have missed the fact that TGP is not Cabot-Williams, and vice versa, and that whatever routing maps TGP has displayed in-person so far are unlikely to align with whatever the other developer puts together.
[I noticed as of Feb. 24 that WAMC's text was corrected, but without acknowledging any error.]
Similarly, Steve Reilly of the Binghamton Press ran the Cabot-Williams announcement as though it represented a second pipeline destined to criss-cross the Valley of Opportunity, joining several additional on-paper or underway projects which are intended to run north only as far as the Southern Tier's Millennium Pipeline.
I conclude, however, that the Cabot-Williams thing represents a second proposal for fulfilling the same single infrastructural need.
Not yet comprehended is that, in the end, there's only going to be one of these pipelines built (unless all the economic plusses of construction must again be snuffed out by the fates of the market, or by anti-development activism, the latter of which New York State is already over-supplied). Under the American system of both intrastate and interstate energy transmission, capitalists are forcibly restrained by the "public interest" from building whatever they cotton to — whether pipeline or powerline. In either PA-NY interconnect case, which will be an interstate case, publicly employed specialists at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will be fully empowered through a mind-numbingly involved process to make the ultimate decisions regarding "public need," and other issues, before construction.
Just that part is likely to take nearly two years.
Upstate media people — rather than immediately seeking to rally the forces of NIMBYism, as is their reflexive habit — should instead be reporting all the facts, getting them straight, and asking such fundamental questions as whether TGP's plan will soon have to be quietly withdrawn as dead in the water, given that leading NEPA natural gas producer $COG is on board with the other plan.
Though either pipeline would be likely to go somewhere through Schoharie Township — because that place is pretty close to the intended interconnects with the already-built TGP 200 west-east line, and the already-built Iroquois Gas Transmission northwest-southeast line — the situation is way too premature to be making panicky phone calls to landowners regarding parcel-specific crossings, as the Schoharie town super has already done.
