Engineering criticizes pipeline project

FRITZ MAYER
Posted 4/12/17

RIVER VALLEY — It looks like the Millennium Pipeline proposal for the Eastern System Upgrade Project, which includes the proposed compressor station near Eldred and an expansion of the …

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Engineering criticizes pipeline project

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RIVER VALLEY — It looks like the Millennium Pipeline proposal for the Eastern System Upgrade Project, which includes the proposed compressor station near Eldred and an expansion of the compressor station in Hancock, may be vulnerable to legal challenges based on the charge of segmentation.

Segmentation, which is prohibited under environmental law, exists when an organization says it is building one project, but it turns out actually to be a part of a much larger project.

For instance, three environmental groups, including the Delaware Riverkeeper Network (DRN), brought a lawsuit charging segmentation against the Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company and won that lawsuit in June 2014. The court ruled at the time that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) allowed for “segmentation” in review of the proposed Northeast Project, and further that FERC’s Environmental Assessment of the project was “deficient in its failure to include any meaningful analysis of the cumulative impacts,” of the project.

With regard to the Eastern System Upgrade Project, a question is arising regarding a 36-inch segment of pipeline called Huguenot Loop, in the opinion of one engineer.

DRN hired Richard B. Kuprewicz, president of a company called Accufacts Inc. to review the Millennium project, and he found that Huguenot Loop was overbuilt. In a report to DRN, Kupresicz wrote, “Millennium’s request for a larger diameter 36-inch, 1,350 psig [pounds per square inch gauge] MAOP [maximum allowable operating pressure] for the Project’s new pipeline segment (Huguenot Loop) is inconsistent and unwarranted. Such an unusual MAOP increase proposal over the Millennium Pipeline system’s design in combination with the Project’s 36-inch diameter pipe proposal, signals to me that further expansion projects are likely or already planned in the future operation of Millennium Pipeline. Such future projects, I believe, are reasonably foreseeable based on basic engineering principles and must be included in the project’s FERC application.”

According to a press release from Protect Orange County, the report also connects the Eastern System Upgrade project to the Millennium Valley Lateral Pipeline, which will transport natural gas to the Competitive Power Ventures power plant currently under construction in Wawayanda.

“We’ve long suspected that all these projects have been illegally segmented from one another and further that there are more expansion plans already mapped out. This report confirms that,” said Pramilla Malick, chair of Protect Orange County.

Millennium spokeswoman Michelle Hook has publicly rejected Kuprewicz’s finding and noted that FERC has rejected that segmentation argument as well. She has said the two projects are separate and apart from each other and should properly be considered as separate applications, as FERC is doing.

But FERC and another pipeline company have lost on this issue in the past, and Maya van Rossum, the leader of DRN, has said that she will take the matter to court.

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