Exaggerated Claims for ACP Pipeline Called Into Question

Do an honest assessment of ACP pipeline’s other costs

Letter to Editor of Morgantown Dominion Post, February 4, 2019

Rebecca McPhail of the West Virginia Manufacturers Association, (DP-Jan.17) makes so many false and deceptive claims about the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP), manufacturing in West Virginia and environmentalists, it is hard to know what to correct first.

She claims West Virginia “is sitting on a gold mine of energy and economic prosperity,” but environmental activists threaten this prosperity by blocking “construction of the ACP.” She goes on to claim these activists threaten manufacturing jobs in West Virginia and that 4,500 construction jobs will be lost, if the pipeline is not completed.

First, the ACP was not designed to support manufacturers in West Virginia; it was designed to move Marcellus shale gas out of West Virginia to supply already saturated markets on the Atlantic seaboard and for export. In fact, the Obama administration granted Dominion Energy, one of ACP’s stakeholders, the right to export natural gas to markets such as Japan and India in 2013.

Second, McPhail’s claims about construction jobs are clearly inflated and misleading. ACP provided these numbers, and they are based on a cumulative jobs methodology that counts construction jobs as the average yearly workforce multiplied by the number of project years, in this case six, to complete the work. So, the real number is closer to 750 jobs. Many of these jobs would go to outof-state workers, and in fact the major pipeline construction companies hired by ACP are from Texas, Wisconsin and Oregon.

Third, there is a broad coalition of concerned West Virginians opposed to the pipeline for legitimate reasons. Many landowners in the path of the pipeline contest ACP’s use of eminent domain for private gain, as it takes land from its rightful owners for so-called “public infrastructure.”

It’s time for industry lobbyists like McPhail to stop characterizing criticism of the ACP as “re fl e x ive opposition.” It is clear that the ACP and its supporters make false and deceptive claims to distract from the true cost of pipeline development. Let’s do an honest and impartial assessment of those costs.

John P. Lambertson, Morgantown, WV

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Tagged as: ACP, capital costs, drilling, fracking, interstate pipeline, marcellus shale, natural gas, sediment, subsidence