A few years ago, CBS ran a show called Under the Dome about a town mysteriously trapped inside a dome. Nothing could get in or out.
The Northeast faces something a little like that when it comes to natural gas. While the United States is awash in natural gas thanks to fracking, much of that abundance is prevented from going to customers in the Northeast, the Wall Street Journal reports:
U.S. gas production rose to a record of more than 37 trillion cubic feet last year, up 44% from a decade earlier. Yet the infrastructure needed to move gas around the country hasn’t kept up. Pipelines aren’t in the right places, and when they are, they’re usually decades old and often too small.
Some effects from this include,
Earlier this year, two utilities that service the New York City area stopped accepting new natural-gas customers in two boroughs and several suburbs. Citing jammed supply lines running into the city on the coldest winter days, they said they couldn’t guarantee they’d be able to deliver gas to additional furnaces. Never mind that the country’s most prolific gas field, the Marcellus Shale, is only a three-hour drive away.
As you might remember from a previous Taking Care of Business, last winter Massachusetts natural gas customers received liquefied natural gas shipments from Trinidad and Tobago and Russia.
A lack of energy infrastructure means the Northeast pays some of the highest energy prices in the U.S.
This situation is occurring because, while anti-energy activists failed to stop the fracking boom, they’ve been more successful in blocking the construction of pipelines.
These “keep it in the ground” advocates built a virtual force field – a dome – locking out plentiful natural gas.
They’ve done this with the help of political allies like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo whose administration has blocked projects like the Constitution pipeline from transporting shale gas from Pennsylvania into the Empire State.
Similar blockades to energy infrastructure are occurring at the local level in Massachusetts and Vermont.
The federal government makes it tough to build energy infrastructure at the same time. The process is overly-complicated and time consuming.
As U.S. Chamber CEO Tom Donohue testified before Congress in March, “It shouldn’t take longer to approve a project than to build it. Environmental reviews and public input remain important parts of the process – but they can’t go on and on forever. Let’s stop holding private investment hostage while projects are held up by permitting delays.”
These obstacles to pipelines and other energy infrastructure have significant costs: nearly $92 billion in lost GDP and 728,000 job opportunities lost, according to a Global Energy Institute study.
Reduced access to affordable energy means reduced economic development.
“It will basically put economic growth at a halt,” Keith Rooney of National Grid PLC, a utility company serving residents in Long Island, put it bluntly in the WSJ story. “It’s going to start with the big customers and go all the way down to mom-and-pops.”
Matt Letourneau of the U.S. Chamber’s Global Energy Institute put it well, “America’s ability to realize its competitive potential depends on making smart infrastructure choices – and that includes critical energy infrastructure.”
