By Toby Z. Rice
Winter Storm Fern has delivered a clear and uncomfortable reminder of how America’s energy system actually works when it is under stress.
During the storm, natural gas prices at Station 165 – located in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, where the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) interconnects and Appalachian gas flows toward the Southeast – spiked to roughly $150 per thousand cubic feet (Mcf), nearly fifty times the national average price last year.
This was the result of scarcity pricing. In plain terms, the market was signaling that there was not enough infrastructure to move available gas supply where it was urgently needed.
When temperatures plunge, demand spikes, and reliability matters most, the grid depends on resources that are dispatchable, fuel-secure, and available around the clock. That dependence is not ideological; it is operational.
This is where permitting reform stops being an abstract regulatory debate and becomes a consumer issue.
While much of the nation is seeing historically high natural gas prices, the hardest hit regions are the very regions across the Eastern Seaboard that have seen proposed natural gas infrastructure blocked or delayed over the past decade.
Pipelines are proposed because there is anticipation of demand. When those pipelines cannot be built and the demand manifests, regions are forced to either turn to alternatives, force demand off the system through price, or both.
A good example is New England. While nationally, natural gas supplied approximately 41 percent of U.S. power generation during Fern, New England was powered by oil – accounting for roughly 39 percent of generation. With limited natural gas infrastructure and renewables unable to meet the demand, the region was forced to turn to a more expensive, more polluting source of power. This is not the clean, affordable future the people of New England were promised.
The painful irony is hard to miss. Policies intended to protect consumers and the environment can end up increasing prices and emissions during the moments of greatest vulnerability.
The Mountain Valley Pipeline, which is finally in service after years of litigation and delay, almost certainly would not have been built under today’s permitting regime were it not for an act of Congress. If that is what it takes to complete a single, critical pipeline, something in the system is fundamentally misaligned with reality.
Affordable and reliable energy is not optional; it is foundational. Every hospital, factory, and household depends on it. And every credible energy system depends on infrastructure that can actually be built, expanded, and operated.
Plans are underway to expand MVP and other pipeline infrastructure to deliver even more gas to regions that need it. Yet those plans are already encountering legal challenges based on assertions that additional infrastructure is unnecessary. Recent events prove otherwise.
Energy does not move on wishful thinking. It moves through pipelines and transmission lines that require permits that are timely, predictable, and grounded in law, not endless cycles of delay and litigation.
It is time to acknowledge reality. Demand is growing. Reliability margins are tightening. Winter Storm Fern is a warning that those margins will be exposed in the form of triple-digit natural gas prices. We need to return our nation to the reliable, affordable system we had just over a decade ago, and the way we can do it is through permitting reform that allows us to deliver energy when and where it is needed.
We need a permitting framework that is rigorous but workable, environmentally responsible, and decisive. One that allows critical infrastructure to be evaluated thoroughly and then, once approved, actually built and put into service. And we need this framework today.
Permitting reform is not ideological. It is practical. And it is urgent.
Toby Z. Rice is President & CEO, EQT Corporation, a global leader in Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
