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
Carbon capture and pollution.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

When Trump enters the Oval Office again in January, there are some climate change-related programs he could roll back or revise immediately, some that could take years to dismantle, and some that may well be beyond his reach. And then there’s carbon capture and storage.

For all the new regulations and funding the Biden administration issued to reduce emissions and advance the clean energy economy over the past four years, it did little to update the regulatory environment for carbon capture and storage. The Treasury Department never clarified how the changes to the 45Q tax credit for carbon capture under the Inflation Reduction Act affect eligibility. The Department of Transportation has not published its proposal for new safety rules for pipelines that transport carbon dioxide. And the Environmental Protection Agency has yet to determine whether it will give Texas permission to regulate its own carbon dioxide storage wells, a scenario that some of the state’s own representatives advise against.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue
Economy

Trump’s Tariff Threats Will Soon Be Tested

What he wants them to do is one thing. What they’ll actually do is far less certain.

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Donald Trump believes that tariffs have almost magical power to bring prosperity; as he said last month, “To me, the world’s most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariffs. It’s my favorite word.” In case anyone doubted his sincerity, before Thanksgiving he announced his intention to impose 25% tariffs on everything coming from Canada and Mexico, and an additional 10% tariff on all Chinese goods.

This is just the beginning. If the trade war he launched in his first term was haphazard and accomplished very little except costing Americans money, in his second term he plans to go much further. And the effects of these on clean energy and climate change will be anything but straightforward.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue
Electric Vehicles

The New Electric Cars Are Boring, and That’s Okay

Give the people what they want — big, family-friendly EVs.

Boredom and EVs.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Apple

The star of this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show was the Hyundai Ioniq 9, a rounded-off colossus of an EV that puts Hyundai’s signature EV styling on a three-row SUV cavernous enough to carry seven.

I was reminded of two years ago, when Hyundai stole the L.A. show with a different EV: The reveal of Ioniq 6, its “streamliner” aerodynamic sedan that looked like nothing else on the market. By comparison, Ioniq 9 is a little more banal. It’s a crucial vehicle that will occupy the large end of Hyundai's excellent and growing lineup of electric cars, and one that may sell in impressive numbers to large families that want to go electric. Even with all the sleek touches, though, it’s not quite interesting. But it is big, and at this moment in electric vehicles, big is what’s in.

Keep reading...Show less
Green