Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Economy

Is Joe Manchin’s Pipeline a Big Deal?

A modestly bad pipeline, in 1 chart

Joe Manchin.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

If there’s one climate policy you’re likely to hear about in the debt ceiling deal, it’s the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

The 304-mile pipeline, which will link West Virginia’s booming gas fields to the East Coast and Texas, essentially received automatic approval under the bipartisan deal. The bill compels federal agencies to approve the pipeline and then shields those permits from judicial review, all but guaranteeing the project’s eventual completion.

If nothing else, the deal brings the saga over the Mountain Valley Pipeline to a close almost a year after it began: The White House initially agreed to support the project last year in exchange for Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia’s support for Biden’s climate law. But neither Manchin nor Biden could get a bill containing the pipeline through Congress last year as part of a larger package of permitting reforms. Manchin persevered, and the pipeline wriggled into the deal over the weekend thanks to House Republicans and oil-and-gas lobbyists. Manchin, it seems, finally has his pipeline.

The project isn’t the most important climate item in the deal. That distinction has to go to the deal’s preservation of the Inflation Reduction Act, which will ensure hundreds of billions of dollars go to clean energy and infrastructure over the next decade. Nor is it the deal’s worst blow to the climate: As I wrote yesterday, Democrats’ failure to secure any power-grid reform takes that title.

Yet the Mountain Valley Pipeline, or MVP, is the item that environmental groups have focused on the most. “Allowing this deal to advance sets a dangerous precedent,” Ben Jealous, the Sierra Club’s executive director, said in a statement. “We can pay America’s bills without undermining bedrock environmental protections or fast tracking the fracked gas Mountain Valley Pipeline.”

So I was curious: How big a deal is the MVP? When completed, it will transmit 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day: What does that actually mean for the country’s natural gas transmission?

Well, here’s a potentially helpful chart:

Energy Information Administration chart with MVP data.Energy Information Administration/Heatmap

This is the Energy Information Administration’s chart of new natural-gas pipeline capacity from 1995 to 2022 with my addition. I’ve added the MVP’s capacity at the right. As you can see, the MVP alone will add more pipeline capacity than the entire U.S. added last year — but that’s partially because the country added much less capacity in 2022 than it has in any year since records began in 1995.

I’ll be honest that the chart helps me think more clearly about the project, but not in a way that’s easy to describe. The Mountain Valley Pipeline is a medium-largeish pipeline — big enough to single-handedly expand the country’s ability to move natural gas, but not so big that it will change the fundamental trend that fewer new pipelines are getting built every year.

The MVP’s most important effect may not be its size, but its strategic location: By connecting the productive Utica and Marcellus shale fields in Appalachia to the Transcontinental pipeline, a massive backbone conduit that links New Jersey to the Rio Grande Valley, it will make it easier for cheap natural gas to reach the population centers — and export terminals — of the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast. That will, in turn, spur a modest increase in natural-gas drilling, which could increase American emissions by roughly 6 to 16 million metric tons a year, according to an estimate from The Washington Post.

The Inflation Reduction Act, by comparison, will eliminate roughly 660 million tons a year by 2030. So preserving the IRA is worth the carbon cost of this pipeline — but it would be better, of course, not to have to make such a choice at all.

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Energy

Exclusive: Trump’s Plans to Build AI Data Centers on Federal Land

The Department of Energy has put together a list of sites and is requesting proposals from developers, Heatmap has learned.

A data center and Nevada land.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Department of Energy is moving ahead with plans to allow companies to build AI data centers and new power plants on federal land — and it has put together a list of more than a dozen sites nationwide that could receive the industrial-scale facilities, according to an internal memo obtained by Heatmap News.

The memo lists sites in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Colorado, and other locations. The government could even allow new power plants — including nuclear reactors and carbon-capture operations — to be built on the same sites to generate enough electricity to power the data centers, the memo says.

Keep reading...Show less
Economy

AM Briefing: Liberation Day

On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Podcast

The Least-Noticed Climate Scandal of the Trump Administration

Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.

Lee Zeldin.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.

Keep reading...Show less