Officials Now Approve A Williams Natural Gas Pipeline Into NYC And Long Island -- Friday, November 7, 2025
Locator: 49369PIPELINE.
Before you begin reading this story, there may be a bigger story here. Does this "turn-of-events" put the Keystone XL back into play. The Canadians really, really would like that pipeline, and the refiners in Texas would really like that heavy oil.
But that's later. Here's the big story breaking in the past few days.
This story is now being posted in the mainstream media (one link here).
The story was first posted on the blog on October 29, 2025, but archived under the new blog format, and I assume more readers missed it.
This
past spring — 10 years after Williams Cos. first proposed the Northeast
Supply Enhancement Project (NESE) and one year after it scrapped plans
for it — the effort to add 400 MMcf/d of natural gas pipeline capacity
into New York City and Long Island was revived, thanks largely to a
changing political climate in Washington, DC. Since then, the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has re-approved the project and
regulators in New York and New Jersey have been mulling over whether to
issue water-quality permits for the $1-billion-plus plan. In today’s RBN
blog, we discuss Williams’s renewed push to get NESE permitted and
built — and the uncertainty still ahead.
As we said in Fight Song, it took nine years, an act of Congress and a Supreme Court ruling — yes, really!
— for the developers of Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) to take their
303-mile, 2-Bcf/d project from announcement to startup. Well, Williams’s
plan to build NESE was, like the plan by EQT Midstream Partners and
other developers of MVP, first unveiled way back in 2015, but unlike MVP
it still isn’t up and running. Williams was successful in securing a
Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity (CPCN) for the project
from FERC in 2019. However, the New York Department of Environmental
Conservation (DEC) and the New Jersey Department of Environmental
Protection (DEP) both rejected the midstreamer’s applications for Water
Quality Certification under Section 401 of the federal Clean Water Act,
citing (among other things) concern about the project’s impact on
aquatic resources. Williams appealed those denials but walked away from
it all in April 2024 when FERC’s CPCN was about to expire.
Fast-forward
to March of this year when, just before a planned White House meeting
with New York Governor Kathy Hochul, President Trump tweeted that he
would no longer allow New York to block important infrastructure
projects like NESE and the Constitution Pipeline project in upstate New
York, adding, “We will use federal approval!” In April, the Trump
administration put more pressure on Hochul by issuing a stop-work order
on the massive Empire Wind project off Long Island, which was fully
permitted and under construction. But that move was rescinded in May
when the governor promised that state agencies would give pipelines and
other fossil-fuel-related projects a fair hearing.
Williams
announced soon thereafter that it had decided to revive the
left-for-dead NESE project with new applications to FERC, DEC and DEP.
At the same time, Williams said it would pursue a possible revival of
the 125-mile, 650-MMcf/d Constitution Pipeline
in upstate New York, but only if Northeastern governors invited it
“with the red carpet rolled out,” in the words of Williams’s then-CEO
(and now executive chairman) Alan Armstrong. [The Constitution project,
which was approved by FERC in 2014 but denied a New York water-quality
permit in 2016 and effectively canceled in 2020, would run from
northeastern Pennsylvania to west of Albany, NY, where it would tie into
the Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP) and Iroquois Pipeline systems to bring
gas east and south to Massachusetts, Connecticut and Long Island. More
on Constitution in a moment.]
Before we delve further
into NESE’s current status and prospects, we should describe what the
project involves. First of all, it would be the latest in a series of
enhancements that Williams has been making to its 10,000-mile-plus
Transco system, which runs between South Texas and New York City. We’ve
blogged extensively the past couple of years about Williams’s ongoing
efforts to increase southbound capacity on Transco between New Jersey
and the Southeast — see our recent Don’t Stop Believin’
for more — but the company had previously made a number of improvements
to the uppermost reaches of the Transco system that feed the Big Apple.
For
example, back in 2013, Williams completed its Northeast Supply Link
project, adding 250 MMcf/d of eastbound capacity on Transco’s mainline
and Leidy systems. That project included 12 miles of 42-inch-diameter
pipeline in new loops, or parallel lines, in Pennsylvania’s Lycoming and
Monroe counties and in Hunterdon County, NJ, as well as 26 miles of
pipeline upgrades and new or upgraded compression stations. Over the
next four years, Williams also completed its Rockaway Delivery Lateral,
Northeast Connector and New York Bay Expansion projects, each of which
enabled more Marcellus-sourced gas to flow into New York City.
Figure 1. Williams’s Northeast Supply Enhancement Project. Source: Williams
The
NESE project would give the region’s gas grid another boost. As in the
original plan several years ago, the recently revived project would
involve installing 10 miles of 42-inch-diameter pipeline looping
(parallel piping) along Transco in Lancaster County, PA (red line
labeled #1 to lower-left in Figure 1 above); a 3.4-mile,
26-inch-diameter onshore loop of the Lower New York Bay Lateral (LNYBL)
in Middlesex County, NJ (red line labeled #2 within small box in
upper-right and in inset map); and a 23-mile, 26-inch offshore loop of
LNYBL itself (red line labeled #3 in upper-right and in inset map). That
last segment would run to the offshore Rockaway Transfer Point, an
existing interconnection between the LNYBL (long blue line under New
York Harbor) and the Rockaway Delivery Lateral (short blue line from
eastern end of #3 to long, narrow Rockaway Peninsula). The Rockaway
lateral connects to National Grid’s distribution system in Brooklyn.
************************** The Abbreviated Version From MSN
A
proposal to pipe natural gas underwater into New York City won approval
for water permits from state regulators on Friday, reversing prior
decisions that had said the pipeline was too dangerous to health and
marine life.
The
ruling is a win for Williams Co, the Tulsa-based company behind the
project, which is known as the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE)
pipeline. Its stock was up 1.5% on Friday as the company is closer to
its goal of unlocking more natural gas supplies to the Northeast. “We’re
proud to move NESE forward and do our part in providing New Yorkers
access to clean, reliable and affordable natural gas,” said Chad
Zamarin, president and CEO of Williams, in a statement. Natural gas is
used for heating and electricity generation.
The approval also appears to be a sign that some Democratic-controlled states are changing their stance on the impact of new fossil fuel infrastructure. The decision was made by the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), part of the executive branch under Gov. Kathy Hochul. Just five years ago, the same agency—then under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo—had denied the permit, citing the likelihood that it would dredge up toxic material. It was also denied another time before that.
“There is no legal or scientific basis for taking a 180-degree turn from the state’s past denials,” said Mark Izeman, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If built, the pipeline would tear up 23 miles of miles of the New York-New Jersey Harbor floor; destroy marine habitats; and dredge up mercury, copper, PCBs and other toxins.”
