A National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) pre-filing process applied to natural gas pipeline projects has greatly accelerated the average permitting times to a year or less for what used to average more than two years, FERC Commissioner Suedeen Kelly told an industry audience in Santa Fe, NM, last Friday. The same process of regulatory staff and applicants sharing information before a formal filing was applied last year in the pending application by a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Corp. to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) in Long Beach Harbor.

Kelly said there is a lot of pent-up pipeline capacity expansion projects still to be filed. She said applications for new pipelines totaling 3.3 Bcf/d in capacity are likely to be filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission between now and 2010.

Since 1999, Kelly said, FERC has approved 19 different pipeline projects to move supplies out of the Rockies, totaling 1.4 Bcf/d in capacity. Kern River Pipeline to Nevada and California, and the Cheyenne Plains Pipeline east across northeast Colorado and into Kansas are two major ones that the regulator highlighted at a Law Seminars International conference, “Energy in the Southwest.”

By doing the NEPA work early and sharing information on an informal staff-to-company basis, Kelly said the average permitting time has dropped from 28 months to 8-12 months.

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