A federal appeals court in Washington, DC has denied a petition for review of FERC orders approving East Tennessee Natural Gas Co.’s Patriot Pipeline in the Southeast.

The National Committee for the New River Inc. and others challenged the Commission’s environmental review of the Patriot project, claiming that the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) was “inadequate and incomplete” in its analysis of the environmental effect of the pipe project, and that the DEIS and final environmental impact statement (FEIS) failed to adequately identify alternate routes for the pipeline, among other things.

The Commission’s process for “ventilating and analyzing potential environmental impacts of the Patriot project involved the requisite ‘hard look,’ and…any deficiencies in the draft environmental impact statement as may have existed were cured by the final environmental impact statement,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said in its July 9 ruling.

In denying the New River Committee’s petition for review, the appeals court noted that FERC’s November 2002 order approving Patriot “was not arbitrary and capricious or an abuse of discretion.”

The Patriot project, which went into service in November 2003, added about 365,000 Dth/d of firm gas transportation for delivery to customers in the southeastern United States. It expanded Duke Energy’s existing East Tennessee Natural system in Tennessee and Virginia, and extended the system into southwestern Virginia and northern North Carolina through a 95-mile pipeline, bringing natural gas to some parts of Virginia for the first time.

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