Get Your Pipeline Out of My Yard

Thanks to the shale drilling revolution, the U.S. has gone in less than a decade from being woefully short of natural gas to having almost a century’s worth of supplies. But the pipelines that were going to transform American energy use are getting harder to build. To take full advantage of the windfall, the country must fundamentally change the way natural gas flows through the U.S. Yet what used to be seen as a rubber-stamp approval process has turned into a slow-motion headache for pipeline companies, brought on by ecological concerns and the changing economics of natural gas.

Take the case of the Hollerans. The first time they heard about the Constitution pipeline was in 2012, when men started showing up on their land to do survey work. Their 23-acre homestead in northeastern Pennsylvania was in the path of the $875 million pipeline, which would stretch 124 miles from the Marcellus Shale fields of Pennsylvania into New York state, where it would connect with existing pipelines to deliver cheap natural gas to cities in the Northeast.