On July 5, 2020 it was announced the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP), which would have carried fracked natural gas through 600 miles of West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina, will never be completed.

Pipeline owners Dominion and Duke Energy announced they were cancelling the fossil fuel project due to mounting delays and uncertainty. They said the many legal challenges to the project had driven up the projected costs by almost half, from $4.5 billion when it was first announced in 2014 to $8 billion according to the most recent estimate. Environmental and community groups, who have long opposed the project on climate, conservation and racial justice grounds, welcomed the news.

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Then, on July 6, 2020 a District Court judge in Washington, D.C. ordered that the Dakota Access pipeline must shut down by Aug. 5, in a stunning defeat for the Trump administration and the oil industry.

The decision is a momentous win for American Indian tribes that have opposed the Energy Transfer Partners LP project for years.

The U.S. District Court said a crucial federal permit for Dakota Access fell too far short of National Environmental Policy Act requirements to allow the pipeline to continue operating while regulators conduct a broader analysis the court ordered in a previous decision.

The ruling scraps a critical permit from the Army Corps of Engineers, and requires the pipeline to end its three-year run of delivering oil from North Dakota shale fields to an Illinois oil hub.

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Also on July 6, 2020 the U.S. Supreme Court handed another setback to the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline from Canada by keeping in place a lower court ruling that blocked a key environmental permit for the project.

Canadian company TC Energy needs the permit to continue building the long-disputed pipeline across U.S. rivers and streams. Without it, the project that has been heavily promoted by President Donald Trump faces more delay just as work on it had finally begun this year following years of courtroom battles.

Monday’s Supreme Court order also put on hold an earlier court ruling out of Montana as it pertains to other oil and gas pipelines across the nation.

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Ruling against environmentalists, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the federal government has the authority to allow a proposed $7.5 billion natural gas pipeline to cross under the popular Appalachian Trail in rural Virginia.

The 7-2 ruling was a victory for Dominion Energy Inc. and the Trump administration, both of which appealed a lower court ruling that halted construction of the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would run from West Virginia to North Carolina.

Environmental groups including the Sierra Club and Southern Environmental Law Center had sued to stop the pipeline after the U.S. Forest Service gave the green light for the project to run through the George Washington National Forest. After a protracted application process involving multiple federal agencies, the Forest Service granted the right of way under the trail in 2018.

The Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found in 2018 that the Forest Service lacked the authority to grant a right of way for the pipeline where it crosses the Appalachian Trail in the national forest land because the trail was overseen by the National Park Service. The Supreme Court overruled that decision.

The Supreme Court’s ruling will also affect the proposed 300-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would run from West Virginia to southern Virginia and crosses the trail in the Jefferson National Forest.

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The pink ribbons start in northern West Virginia. Tied to flimsy wooden posts stuck a few inches into the earth, they’re easy to miss as they whip in the crisp, fall wind. Heading south, they dot landscapes for 600 miles, marking the proposed route of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. They pass over cave systems and watersheds, climb up and down densely forested Appalachian slopes, crossing the Appalachian Trail and Blue Ridge Parkway. They stamp quiet hollers and hillside family cemeteries. They divide historic African American communities and indigenous land.

The route stretches from the Marcellus Shale region of West Virginia, through Virginia, to southern North Carolina — though the energy companies behind the pipeline have floated the idea of extending it into South Carolina. If completed, the hundreds of miles of 42- and 36-inch diameter steel would carry 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas every day — enough to power 5 million homes daily. Three compressor stations along the route would help transport the gas, and, like much of the pipeline, would be built in lower-income, rural communities, bypassing more affluent property owners.

The project is part of a pipeline boom in the United States prompted by the fossil fuel industry’s shift from a fuel source on the decline, coal, to one on the rise, natural gas. Dominion Energy owns the majority share of the project, which was first proposed in 2014. Some of the most powerful utilities in the Southern U.S. — Duke Energy and Southern Company — own the rest. Those utility companies are also the wholesalers that would profit by reselling the gas to their ratepayers. The companies say the project is necessary because they and other utilities serving Virginia and North Carolina need cheaper gas. And they claim it would be an economic boon to the region.

But economists, environmentalists, researchers, and many residents in the places the pipeline would pass through say the project’s risks and costs outweigh its potential short-term benefits.

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  A federal appeals court denied a request to reconsider a ruling throwing out a permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline to cross two national forests, including parts of the Appalachian Trail.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a request from lead pipeline developer Dominion Energy and the U.S. Forest Service to hold a full-court rehearing.

In December, a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit sharply criticized the Forest Service, saying the agency lacked authority to authorize the pipeline’s crossing of the trail.

The panel also said the agency “abdicated its responsibility to preserve national forest resources” when it approved the pipeline crossing the George Washington and Monongahela National Forests, and a right-of-way across the Appalachian Trial.

The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by the Southern Environmental Law Center on behalf of the Sierra Club, Virginia Wilderness Committee and other environmental groups.

The 605-mile natural gas pipeline would originate in West Virginia and run through parts of North Carolina and Virginia.

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The National Park Service has voluntarily abandoned its defense of the agency’s latest permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline to cross the Blue Ridge Parkway. NPS issued the revised permit after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in August 2018, vacated its original authorization for the pipeline.

On January 16, 2019 the Park Service asked the Fourth Circuit to remand the permit back to the agency so that it could vacate the permit and reconsider whether issuing it was appropriate in light of legal issues raised in the appeal. The agency also noted it needed to reconsider the permit in light of the Fourth Circuit’s recent decision that the pipeline could not cross the Appalachian Trail on national forest land, immediately adjacent to the proposed crossing point for the Blue Ridge Parkway. The court has granted the Park Service’s request to remand the permit back to the agency for reconsideration.

“Unlawfully crossing a National Park is just one of the many problems with the dirty, dangerous Atlantic Coast Pipeline. ACP previously lost permits from the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Army Corps of Engineers, and its FERC Certificate is currently being litigated. The ACP is an unnecessary threat to our health, water, climate, and communities and it shouldn’t be built at a time when clean, renewable energy is abundant and affordable,” said Sierra Club Senior Attorney Nathan Matthews.

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  A permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline to cross two national forests, including parts of the Appalachian Trail, was thrown out Thursday by a federal appeals court that harshly criticized regulators for approving the proposal.

A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond blasted the U.S. Forest Service for granting a special-use permit to build the natural gas pipeline through parts of the George Washington and Monongahela National Forests, and granting a right of way across the Appalachian Trail.

“A thorough review of the record leads to the necessary conclusion that the Forest Service abdicated its responsibility to preserve national forest resources,” Judge Stephanie Thacker wrote for the panel in the unanimous ruling.

The court said the agency had “serious environmental concerns” about the project that were “suddenly, and mysteriously, assuaged in time to meet a private pipeline company’s deadlines.”

The ruling also quoted “The Lorax” by Dr. Seuss, saying the Forest Service is trusted to “speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.”

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Two pipelines are planned to intersect the Appalachian Trail. The 300-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline will cut across the A.T. near Virginia’s Peters Mountain Wilderness Area. The 550-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline pipeline also is planned to cross the Appalachian Trail and the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia’s Augusta and Nelson Counties. Both pipelines will require clearing a 200-foot-wide right-of-way and building new roads through sensitive habitats to service the pipeline.

Beginning in West Virginia, the Mountain Valley Pipeline will span 300 miles from Wetzel County, W.Va., to Pittsylvania County, Va., and will scar views, watersheds, and habitats in George Washington National Forest and in the Roanoke area.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline will also pass through Jefferson National Forest in West Virginia and Virginia before entering the Appalachian Trail National Scenic Trail Corridor and ultimately the Peters Mountain Wilderness Area. In its wake, iconic viewpoints such as Angels Rest will look out across denuded clearcuts.

In addition to the Mountain Valley Pipeline and Atlantic Coast Pipeline, other pipelines are planned throughout the region in North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, and Florida. Protests around each of the pipelines are building momentum.

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However, the Dakota Access pipeline, which would carry up to 570,000 barrels of oil from the Bakken oilfields of North Dakota nearly 1,200 miles to a hub in Illinois, is far from the only pipeline under construction in North America.

Just last week, Canada’s Liberal government approved two major pipeline projects that, if constructed, would greatly expand the amount of tar sands oil being funneled from Alberta to refineries worldwide.

On the East Coast of the United States, the victory at Standing Rock resonated for opponents of the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would carry natural gas 600 miles from West Virginia to North Carolina.

Dominion, the energy company behind the project, has applied for permits to run the pipeline through land designated for conservation — and the proposed route would take it through historic battlefields and near a Native American burial ground.

But pipelines aren’t the only fossil fuel infrastructure projects that are bound to run into citizen opposition in the coming months and years. Along the coast of the Pacific Northwest and the Columbia River are three proposed projects that, if constructed, would constitute the country’s largest coal export terminal, largest crude-oil-by-rail terminal, and largest methanol refinery.

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