Virginia landowners urge FERC to require cancelled Atlantic Coast Pipeline to relinquish easements

Several dozen landowners who granted easements to the developers of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline are asking federal regulators to require the pipeline to give them up now that the project has been cancelled.

“I signed an easement agreement in October 2018 because I felt I had no choice,” wrote Judy Allen in comments filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission this April concerning two Bath County properties the pipeline was to traverse. “The current easement places an unwarranted burden on me and limits my ability to use the property as my sons and I desire.”

The cancellation of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline by electric utilities Dominion Energy and Duke Energy last July opened up a thorny new set of problems. Chief among them: What should happen to land impacted, either legally or ecologically, by the now-dead project?

How federal regulators respond to that question will have implications for thousands of acres of land. The natural gas pipeline, which would have run 604 miles from West Virginia through Virginia into North Carolina, had at the time of its cancellation secured easements for 98 percent of its route. And while the Atlantic Coast never got as far as the Mountain Valley Pipeline, at the time construction was suspended due to legal challenges in December 2018, some degree of work had been conducted on roughly 230 miles of its length.

Read more: https://www.virginiamercury.com/2021/04/21/virginia-landowners-urge-ferc-to-require-cancelled-atlantic-coast-pipeline-to-relinquish-easements/