We Must Stop the Pipeline Again!

The Constitution Pipeline has been in the news since Valentine’s Day (2025), when President Trump created the National Energy Dominance Council. A summary of what has taken place between mid February and mid July can be found here.

Before the end of 2025, the Constitution Pipeline Company (Constitution or Company)  applied for and withdrew an application for a 401 water quality certification with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and filed a Petition to revive the project with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

A quick review of what happened between 2012 and now is required in order to understand what must happen now.

In 2012, the Company pre-filed an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), proposing to construct a 30-inch diameter interstate gas pipeline from the fracking fields in Central Pennsylvania, through the Southern Tier, up and down the forested hills in the Western Catskills, trenching through hundreds of streams and countless acres of fertile farmland in Broome, Delaware, and Schoharie Counties to Wright, NY.

Its 2013 application triggered an environmental review by FERC and the simultaneous review by a variety of other federal agencies under other federal laws. This includes the DEC, which acts as a federal agency under the Clean Water Act. All of these agencies rely on FERC’s EIS to make their decisions.

Constitution, which was partially owned by gas drillers, did not have any contracts with utility companies or end users in New York City or New England when it filed its application. Instead, it was gas drillers and gathering line owners in search of a market. Their effort appeared risk free when they started because they knew FERC would issue a license to them, even though their contracts were between co-owners (gas drillers and gas transporters in this case). They also knew they were guaranteed a 14% rate of return from FERC, so their prospects seemed lucrative.

What Constitution did not expect was that a large group of landowners and community members would join together to Stop the Pipeline in order to preserve all they loved about the place they called home. These rural residents had recently experienced the devastating floods of Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee, and understood that those floodwaters could shift and tear apart the pipeline, potentially causing massive explosions, just as floods had moved homes and farm machinery in 2011. So they relied on the environmental protections guaranteed under the Clean Water Act to fight the project.

The DEC had dealt with the shoddy work of pipeline companies, like Iroquois and Millennium, before, so it kept asking Constitution for more information. DEC also commented to FERC on its scope of work and DEIS. The Company persistently refused to provide it, claiming FERC was in charge and preempted DEC’s review. DEC denied the Company’s application for a 401 water quality certification (WQC) on April 22, 2016 and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (Second Circuit) upheld DEC’s denial in August 2017.

However, that was not the end of the story. Constitution tried to appeal to the Second Circuit (en banc), but was denied, and subsequently petitioned the Supreme Court for cert, which was also denied. It then tried other ways to move forward before giving up in 2020.

There were other court procedures that needed resolving. Stop the Pipeline and other groups had challenged FERC’s certificate of public convenience and necessity in early 2016, and FERC’s waiver orders in 2019 and 2020. After Constitution abandoned the project, FERC moved to dismiss all of these cases, hoping to keep control of the orders it had issued. On November 18, 2021, the Second Circuit granted Stop the Pipeline’s motion to VACATE FERC’s orders. It also instructed FERC to dismiss the agency proceedings.

Unfortunately, we must now repeat this process. However, in this sequel, we have a regulatory and legal record that is completely on our side. For example, the Second Circuit held that the DEC could deny Constitution’s application for a 401 WQC if information about alternative routes and horizontal directional drilling (HDD) under streams is not provided.

Of course, Constitution is up to all its old tricks. On May 30, 2025, it applied for a 401 WQC from the DEC before applying for a license to construct the pipeline from FERC. This is like putting the cart before the horse. The Second Circuit vacated the four FERC orders and instructed FERC to dismiss the agency proceedings in 2021. Since its order was issued, there is no longer a legally valid (1) docket, (2) environmental impact statement, or (3) federal license for this project. Without a new federal application and associated environmental review, DEC should have denied Constitution’s application on procedural grounds. Instead it issued three notices of incomplete application, which allowed Constitution to withdraw its application on November 7, 2025, without having to seek judicial review of a denial.

On December 19, 2025, Contitution filed a Petition with FERC asking the Commission to:

1. re-issue its 2014 order granting Constitution a certificate of public convenience and necessity to build the pipeline; and
2. re-affirm its 2019 order declaring that DEC waived its right to deny the 401 water quality certification.

On January 8, 2026, FERC issued a Notice of Constitution’s December 19, 2025 Petition and set January 29, 2026 at 5 pm as the deadline for intervening even though landowners and other interested agencies and municipalities had not yet been formally notified of this proceeding.

FERC must reject or deny this Petition because the two orders Constitution wants FERC to re-issue and re-affirm were vacated by the Second Circuit in 2021. That means the orders are null and void. Since the orders no longer exist, they cannot legally be re-issued or re-affirmed.

Even if the Petition were granted, there is no need for this project. By terminating in Wright, NY, the Constitution Pipeline is a Dead End. While the Iroquois and Tennessee Gas Pipelines both intersect in Wright, NY, they are already congested (full of gas) when there is a demand for it. Therefore, in spite of all the hype, the Constitution Pipeline cannot lower prices to consumers in either New York City or New England because it cannot provide any additional gas to those markets.