Eastern N.C. readies for Atlantic Coast Pipeline

Triangle Business Journal
by Lauren K. Ohnesorge

News that the Atlantic Coast Pipeline has passed a final environmental assessment is welcomed by economic developers in eastern North Carolina, who are hoping expanding companies can one day directly tap into the 600-mile project.

Norris Tolson, CEO of the Carolinas Gateway Partnership, says “almost every project” he's trying to recruit – and advanced manufacturing projects in particular – require natural gas access.

And he’s not alone in that assessment.

“We have counties that are 40 miles from a natural gas line,” N.C. Commerce Secretary Tony Copeland said on UNC TV's Bottom Line program last week. “They will never get manufacturing in without access to natural gas.”

Tolson says his team brings up the ACP often in discussions with companies looking for sites in North Carolina. He says “tentative agreements” exist that, if the pipeline is built, “we can come back and make our case for tap-offs.”

An agreement with the utility companies behind ACP could allow a major manufacturer direct access to that natural gas, he says.

The utilities have said no such agreements have been finalized, and Tolson says discussions are “preliminary” in nature.

But he says tap-outs would be beneficial to ACP partners such as Duke Energy and Dominion.

“Everything is based on usage,” he says. “If the usage is large enough, the companies will work out an arrangement with a client, with us helping to negotiate or push the deal… At the end of the day, it’s about how they sell more gas.”

Aaron Ruby, a spokesman for ACP, says multiple state and federal approvals lie between it and construction – not just a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission go ahead. As the pipeline is targeted to go through 18 to 20 miles of national forest land, it requires specialty use permits from the National Park Service, on top of a permit from the U.S. Forest Service. Permits are required to deploy a horizontal directional drill underneath the Appalachian Trail and the Blue Ridge Parkway. Water quality approves are required at both the state and federal level. All of the permits are progressing along a similar timeline, he says.

“Based on everything, we remain very confident that we’ll receive all the state and federal approvals we need in order to begin construction this fall,” he says.

Economic developers aren’t the only ones awaiting the outcome of ACP’s permit applications.

Multiple environmental groups have spoken out against the project, including the Sierra Club, which submitted more than 500 pages of comments on FERC’s draft environmental statement in April.

FERC received more than 18,000 comments in opposition to the project.

And residents, unwilling to grant easements to the pipeline, have criticized both the project and its location. Multiple property owners along its path in eastern North Carolina have said they fear it might harm their property values and endanger their safety. And some have questioned ACP’s process in choosing its route, noting the prevalence of low income households and minority households. ACP, in return, says it has made multiple route adjustments and that demographics do not play into its decisions.

But in a recent letter published in the journal Science, Ryan Emanuel, as associate professor at N.C. State University, points out that the nearly 30,000 Native Americans living near the proposed route “make up 13.2 percent of the impacted population in North Carolina, where only 1.2 % of the population is Native American.”

Environmentalists have said they're planning a protest against the ACP in Raleigh Wednesday.