FERC on Wednesday upheld an April finding that Washington state environmental regulators, by failing to act by the allotted deadlines, had waived the certification requirements under the Clean Water Act (CWA) and Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA) with respect to Georgia Strait Crossing Pipeline LP’s natural gas pipeline project in the Pacific Northwest.

In granting Georgia Strait’s petition for a declaratory order in late April, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission agreed with the company’s position that the Washington Department of Ecology had failed to respond in a timely fashion to its applications for a CZMA consistency determination and CWA certification. FERC, which issued a certificate for the pipe project in September 2002, required Georgia Strait to receive both CZMA and CWA approval before it could begin construction.

Georgia Strait sought CWA certification on July 12, 2001. The CWA required Ecology to respond within one year of receiving Georgia Strait’s request, but the agency did not act until July 16, 2003.

The company filed its application for CZMA certification on May 2, 2001. The application, however, was deficient because it failed to include a shoreline permit and other documentation. Ecology was required to notify Georgia Stait within 30 days that its application was incomplete, the FERC rehearing order said, but it waited 20 months before doing so.

Rather than disputing that it failed to give Georgia Strait the 30-day notification, Ecology on rehearing argued that FERC “improperly” granted the company a certificate and presidential permit before receiving both CWA and CZMA certifications from Washington state.

The assertion that the Commission should have withheld its approval of the project until Georgia Strait had its CWA and CZMA certifcations in hand is a “collateral attack” on FERC’s September 2002 order approving the project, the order said. If the Washington state environmental agency had a problem with FERC’s action, it had 30 days after the Commission issued its final decision to challenge or request rehearing of the order, it noted.

Ecology further claimed FERC’s authorizations “erroneously preempted” the requirements of both the CWA and CZMA. “Ecology ignores the fact that, as with virtually every certificate issued by the Commission that authorizes construction of natural gas pipeline facilities, the NGA [Natural Gas Act] authorization for [Georgia Strait’s] proposed pipeline is conditioned upon meeting the federal permitting requirements of, among other things, both the CWA and CZMA. Thus, as so conditioned, [the company] could not exercise the certificate authority granted by the Commission by constructing the project without first obtaining CWA and CZMA certifications from Ecology.”

Georgia Strait’s proposed 84-mile pipeline would supply gas to Cherry Point, WA. The targeted in-service date for the project is fall 2005.

©Copyright 2004 Intelligence Press Inc. All rights reserved. The preceding news report may not be republished or redistributed, in whole or in part, in any form, without prior written consent of Intelligence Press, Inc.