No Need for the Constitution Pipeline

Constitution must show a public need for the gas it would transport in its pipeline in order to obtain a certificate of public convenience and necessity from FERC. While it is claiming the pipeline would bring fracked gas (and lower gas prices) to New York City and New England, that is physically impossible because the two pipelines it would interconnect with in Wright, NY are already full of gas when it is most needed. Since Constitution cannot increase the size of the pipelines going to New York City or New England, it cannot lower the price consumers pay for their gas.

Even industry experts agree with this assessment. “Constitution simply shuffles existing volumes rather than injecting new molecules into the premium Transcontinental Zone 6 market,” wrote Zach Krause on June 18, 2025 in his East Daley Analytics post, Williams Plays Pipeline Politics in Northeast.

As Mr. Krause points out, this was also true in 2014, when FERC granted the now-vacated certificate of public convenience and necessity to Constitution. However, in 2014, Iroquois had an application at FERC that would have enabled it to reverse the flow of gas and send it north into Canada, probably for LNG export, rather than south into New York City. That project was called SoNo, and was withdrawn in 2020 after Constitution abandoned its project. Kinder Morgan’s $5 billion Northeast Energy Direct (NED) project would have run parallel to Constitution and then continued east across New York State, Massachusetts and New Hampshire to a point northwest of Boston, where it would have interconnected with the Algonquin Gas Transmission Pipeline. Work on NED was suspended on April 20, 2016, just as DEC was denying Constitution’s application for a 401 water quality certification.

Like a row of dominoes lined-up vertically, the proposed pipeline projects in the northeast toppled down over the next few years. The original push was local opposition, which lead to DEC’s denial of Constitution’s 401 water quality certification.

On July 23, 2026, Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Law confirmed all the points Stop the Pipeline has been making about the lack of need for this pipeline project. No customers have agreed to sign a 15-year contract to purchase the gas since President Trump touted it on Valentine’s Day 2025.

Dan Dolan, President of the New England Power Generators, recently said that contracting to buy gas would be more expensive than buying it on the spot market. “To move forward with the contracts presumed here would create tens of millions of dollars in costs for an individual generator and require electric capacity market prices far above what are seen today,” Dolan wrote. “For generators operating in a highly competitive wholesale electricity market, these costs raise significant financing questions.”

Even Alan Armstrong, the ex-CEO and Chairman of the Board of Williams, is having a hard time selling pipelines from his new perch on the Senate floor.

However, that hasn’t stopped him from spreading lies about why the Constitution Pipeline was stopped by NYS in 2016. Instead of admitting that his company refused to provide the required information to the DEC, he called the denial a “political veto.”

That’s not what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit concluded.