All We Are Saying ... Is Give (NESE) a Chance – Can Williams Finally Build Its New York City Pipeline?

This past spring — 10 years after Williams Cos. first proposed the Northeast Supply Enhancement Project (NESE) and one year after it scrapped plans for it — the effort to add 400 MMcf/d of natural gas pipeline capacity into New York City and Long Island was revived, thanks largely to a changing political climate in Washington, DC. Since then, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has re-approved the project and regulators in New York and New Jersey have been mulling over whether to issue water-quality permits for the $1-billion-plus plan. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss Williams’s renewed push to get NESE permitted and built — and the uncertainty still ahead.

As we said in Fight Song, it took nine years, an act of Congress and a Supreme Court ruling — yes, really! — for the developers of Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) to take their 303-mile, 2-Bcf/d project from announcement to startup. Well, Williams’s plan to build NESE was, like the plan by EQT Midstream Partners and other developers of MVP, first unveiled way back in 2015, but unlike MVP it still isn’t up and running. Williams was successful in securing a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity (CPCN) for the project from FERC in 2019. However, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) both rejected the midstreamer’s applications for Water Quality Certification under Section 401 of the federal Clean Water Act, citing (among other things) concern about the project’s impact on aquatic resources. Williams appealed those denials but walked away from it all in April 2024 when FERC’s CPCN was about to expire.

Fast-forward to March of this year when, just before a planned White House meeting with New York Governor Kathy Hochul, President Trump tweeted that he would no longer allow New York to block important infrastructure projects like NESE and the Constitution Pipeline project in upstate New York, adding, “We will use federal approval!” In April, the Trump administration put more pressure on Hochul by issuing a stop-work order on the massive Empire Wind project off Long Island, which was fully permitted and under construction. But that move was rescinded in May when the governor promised that state agencies would give pipelines and other fossil-fuel-related projects a fair hearing.

Williams announced soon thereafter that it had decided to revive the left-for-dead NESE project with new applications to FERC, DEC and DEP. At the same time, Williams said it would pursue a possible revival of the 125-mile, 650-MMcf/d Constitution Pipeline in upstate New York, but only if Northeastern governors invited it “with the red carpet rolled out,” in the words of Williams’s then-CEO (and now executive chairman) Alan Armstrong. [The Constitution project, which was approved by FERC in 2014 but denied a New York water-quality permit in 2016 and effectively canceled in 2020, would run from northeastern Pennsylvania to west of Albany, NY, where it would tie into the Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP) and Iroquois Pipeline systems to bring gas east and south to Massachusetts, Connecticut and Long Island. More on Constitution in a moment.]

Before we delve further into NESE’s current status and prospects, we should describe what the project involves. First of all, it would be the latest in a series of enhancements that Williams has been making to its 10,000-mile-plus Transco system, which runs between South Texas and New York City. We’ve blogged extensively the past couple of years about Williams’s ongoing efforts to increase southbound capacity on Transco between New Jersey and the Southeast — see our recent Don’t Stop Believin’ for more — but the company had previously made a number of improvements to the uppermost reaches of the Transco system that feed the Big Apple.

For example, back in 2013, Williams completed its Northeast Supply Link project, adding 250 MMcf/d of eastbound capacity on Transco’s mainline and Leidy systems. That project included 12 miles of 42-inch-diameter pipeline in new loops, or parallel lines, in Pennsylvania’s Lycoming and Monroe counties and in Hunterdon County, NJ, as well as 26 miles of pipeline upgrades and new or upgraded compression stations. Over the next four years, Williams also completed its Rockaway Delivery Lateral, Northeast Connector and New York Bay Expansion projects, each of which enabled more Marcellus-sourced gas to flow into New York City.