By Gordon Tomb
Northeastern states are scrambling to address rising energy costs. New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and others are even considering abandoning some of their most restrictive Green New Deal-style emissions policies to increase the supply of affordable sources.
Such new energy projects are among the most difficult endeavors to bring to fruition. Requiring massive investments and at least a modicum of public support, they have no chance of becoming reality without people of influence standing for their success.
Take the proposed Constitution Pipeline for instance. The benefits of this 125-mile-long pipeline, which would deliver Pennsylvania natural gas to energy-starved New York and New England, are so numerous, one might wonder why it hasn’t already been built. Except that the project is among many such enterprises that have languished in a regulatory morass fueled by anti-development activists and nurtured by incompetent political leadership.
Yet, new life is stirring for this much-needed supply line. Having first proposed the project in 2013, Williams Companies, a Tulsa-based firm, received federal approvals more than a decade ago. In 2016, the company sidelined the project after New York regulators denied a water-quality permit.
Earlier this year, Williams resubmitted applications to regulators, projecting the pipeline to be in service by early 2028. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has received more than 600 comments since January as part of its review.
“The need for this project is well documented,” said Jim Welty, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, in comments to FERC. “Customers throughout New York and New England have experienced significant supply disruptions in recent years due to inadequate natural gas supply and constrained access to the market.”
New England has “resorted to importing natural gas from foreign nations, located thousands of miles away because a more efficient … manner to connect to domestically produced natural gas currently does not exist,” noted Welty.
Connecticut State Sen. Ryan Fazio, a Republican, said Constitution would mitigate New England’s high gas prices, saving customers up to $8.5 billion over the project’s life.
“Historically, peak winter gas prices in the region have averaged at least 2.5 times the national benchmark, and daily price fluctuations can reach up to 30 times the average annual levels due to (pipeline) capacity limitations,” he said.
The 30-inch-diameter pipeline would run from gas fields in northeast Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna County to upstate New York. Connecting with the Iroquois and Tennessee interstate systems, Constitution would deliver enough gas for 3 million homes, or about three percent of Pennsylvania’s current production.
Williams estimates that construction will create 2,500 jobs, generating nearly $300 million in direct labor income and almost $1 billion in total economic output.
Producers of natural gas have long struggled with a lack of pipelines to match production capacity and market needs. The Marcellus region “is by far the most prolific natural gas production area in the U.S., accounting for about one-third of the nation’s daily output,” notes Housley Carr, an energy writer and analyst for RBN Energy.
“The shale play experienced phenomenal growth in the 2010s, its gas production rising [by a factor of 16],” writes Carr. “But the pace of growth has slowed dramatically in recent years, mostly due to takeaway constraints.”
Refusing the construction of the Constitution Pipeline is “absolute insanity,” says Mike Sommers, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute.
In the Texas Permian Basin, where natural gas is a byproduct of oil-well drilling, the price of gas sometimes is driven so low by the pipeline shortage that producers must pay to have it taken away.
Electricity prices in New England are 55 percent higher than Pennsylvania’s thanks to limited access to natural gas. However, affordability issues are softening northeast governors who have long opposed pipelines.
This April, Bloomberg Law reported that Williams CEO Chad Zamarin had received support for Constitution in meetings with all New England governors. In neighboring New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul moderated positions on energy projects last year as her election campaign got underway.
Following his pattern of avoiding controversial issues, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has said nothing publicly about the Constitution Pipeline, even though natural gas represents arguably the Keystone State’s most promising industry.
In fact, of the hundreds who submitted comments to FERC, those identifying as state politicians were only the Connecticut state senator and 13 Republican members of the New York State Legislature, whose joint statement supported the pipeline. Bloomberg’s report of New England gubernatorial support notwithstanding, a search of public statements favoring Constitution turned up just one—from New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte.
Leadership matters in developing energy projects. Following the 2025 inauguration of the President Donald Trump, five pipeline projects, including Constitution, were revived in the Northeast, after years of being stalled by political hostility, according to an S&P Global analysis. Outside the region, 10 projects received federal or state approvals.
With due acknowledgment to those openly backing the Constitution Pipeline, surely a project benefiting most of the Northeast deserves stronger support. Frankly, small town America displays more enthusiasm for the ribbon cuttings of ice cream shops than have leaders of states promised the bounty of affordable energy and a thriving gas industry.
Originally published at The American Spectator, June 8, 2026.
Gordon Tomb is a senior advisor for the CO2 Coalition and a senior fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation, a Pennsylvania free-market think tank.
If the bastards want to freeze in the dark, let ’em.
Don’t worry, when trump is done running the US into the ground they’ll freeze in the dark alright.
Here’s your ATTENTION for the day…
It’s just my prediction. In a few years we’ll see how it turns out.
Every prediction you have ever made is provably nonsense.
You are worse than the worst climate model.
USA will do just great, so long as they aren’t stupid enough to elect Democrats in 2026 or 2028. !
Isn’t the drunken Kamal the current Democrat front-runner?
That is how empty they are!
Drunken? That’s a new one. Who taught you that?
All one needs to do is watch and listen to her.
YOU need to be true to your faith and stop using FF or forever be the laughing stock of the world and a flaming hypocrite.
How about following your own advice and stop using renewables.
Everyone stops using wind and solar on still nights, and cloudy still days.
The world can cope very easily without the burden of these parasitic unreliable grid-destroying clayton’s electricity supplies.
You on the other hand, rely totally for the massive benefits derived from oil. coal and gas to even exist.
You could never exist without them.
In your attempt to sound flippant and you managed to do was sound ignorant.
I would never use renewables if I was given the choice. Thanks to you socialists, everybody is forced to suffer with them.
I’m in the Hunter Valley, NSW… almost all COAL powered electricity here.
Lots of local rooftop solar though… although maybe not today.
Turned out to be a really nice day, but its winter, and sun’s angle is low.
No renewables here just gas powered generation and it works wonderfully.
We have a surplus of renewables here in California and the highest electricity rates in the US (aside from HI). Newsom’s idiot team stopped tapping our oil reserves and has forced the closure of 85% of our refining capacity. Now our refined products (gasoline, diesel and jet fuel) will arrive by tankers from South Korea and India. Many of our gas stations were forced to close because their state permits were never issued to replace the tanks as mandated by state regulations.
You should save yourself and leave before it’s too late. I hear the government of North Korea is very serious about minimizing its carbon footprint:
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/the-korean-peninsula-at-night-153325/
Dow Jones now at 51,200…… USA ECONOMY IS SURGING !!
Energy in USA is surging
Oil and Gas production around the world is surging. !
How dare you refute LooserNames fantasies with something as trivial as reality.
According to the IEA
“Orders for new natural gas fired power plants surged to 130GW in 2025, a 25 year high, with US data centre demand a major factor”
IEA ‘World Energy Investment 2026’ (May 2026)
Is that what the voices in your head are telling you today?
Starting with Yoko Ono, then Bernie, then AOC, then the NYT staff
Leadership matters-look who led them into the troubles they’re gonna have. Problem is that the so-called leaders will be out of office, or in the best time honored tradition, blame somebody else-like Trump. Suckers…and they don’t even know it yet. Well, the best scam is the one you get away with-and they will get away-and have gotten away so far-with these.
The political ‘leadership’ in places like New York and Massachusetts has shown its true colors. It’s not just opposition to needed natgas pipelines, so excessive winter heating costs. Sanctuary cities/states. Soft on crime. High and rising taxes. It would seem those states voters are getting what they asked for—and deserve. Sort of ‘fun’ to view from afar. The Germans have a useful word for this. “schadenfreude”.
It’s no coincidence that societies that allow themselves to be governed by leftist morons like Canada’s Justin Trudeau (who jailed citizens with what he decided were “unacceptable views”) bring about their own demise through ‘group-think’ Kumbaya socialism.
Nationally, this is what Grok AI is telling me about new natural gas fired power plants in the U.S. either under construction or being planned for the years ahead:
“Reliable trackers report around 850–860 natural gas power plants (or distinct projects/units) in development as of mid-2026, according to sources like Cleanview. Many of these are proposed or announced and may not be built.
Key Context on Numbers and Capacity
Why the High Numbers but Uncertainty?
For the most current details, check trackers from the EIA (eia860m data), Global Energy Monitor, Sierra Club, or Cleanview, as the pipeline evolves rapidly. Overall, while the raw count of proposed projects is very high, realized additions will likely be a fraction of that, measured more reliably in GW of capacity.”
********************
I do not know whether this is going to be enough to keep up with growing demand for electricity in the midst of the boom in AI data centers. We will just have to keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.
Most of the new data centers recirculate their water and bring their own dispatchable power (either gas powered or nuclear).
“Climate Change” models don’t take into account the Earth’s electric/magnetic fields!
“Back radiation”/”downwelling”, the foundation of “Climate Change”, is a known fraud thanks to the Second Law of Thermodynamics:
Incoming electromagnetic radiation is an entity that is an electric and magnetic field running perpendicular to each other. As such, when a photon is absorbed by the atmosphere, after the photon is destroyed and a new photon is emitted by the atmosphere, that emitted photon can only be emitted upwards towards space, because the atmosphere below has greater magnetic and electric fields, where the magnetic/electric fields photon is spontaneously emitted upwards due to the less ordered, more random, composition of the atmosphere’s magnetic/electric fields in that direction, thereby following the Second Law of Thermodynamic’s entropy property:
“The second law – The level of disorder in the universe is steadily increasing. Systems tend to move from ordered behavior to more random behavior.”
I’m not going to censor you, but it would be nice if you take this bs elsewhere.
As I suspected, wattsupwiththat is a Marxist “false opposition” front, naturally enabling the “climate change” canard by not identifying its Achilles’ heel.
If you really think wuwt is in any shape or form marxist you can call me Karl.
They may be a lot of things but they are upfront and consistent for what they stand for.
“They may be a lot of things but they are upfront and consistent for what they stand for.”
That’s what any “false opposition” will do, you know. They are consistent, but when the actual truth is identified, they resort to the old Marxist tactic of
ad hominem reply. I imploded the “Climate Change” narrative and was attacked for it.
Is this false opposition in the room with us right now?
Can you show us on this doll where the false opposition hurt you?
Were we involved in the Charlie Kirk assassination?
The Soulless Minions of Orthodoxy 1, Sky Dragons 0.
Your comment has nothing to do with subject of this article about natural gas.
Post it in the next Open Thread.
More crappy government standing in the way of a more affordable and comfortable life.
‘Having first proposed the project in 2013, Williams Companies, a Tulsa-based firm, received federal approvals more than a decade ago. In 2016, the company sidelined the project after New York regulators denied a water-quality permit.’
Why haven’t the ‘New York regulators’ been taken to task for clearly mucking with Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, granting Congress the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”?
Is this because there is no person or entity within NE that has ‘standing’ to bring a suit against NY?
Unfortunately from a legal standpoint it’s far easier to stop an energy project involving fossil fuels or nuclear than it is to start and complete one using renewables. Almost all the federal district courts are packed with unelected Liberal judges (for life!) willing to do the Marxist bidding.
‘Almost all the federal district courts are packed with unelected Liberal judges (for life!) willing to do the Marxist bidding.’
“Jefferson and the Jeffersonians proclaimed for decades that if the day ever came when the federal government, through its judiciary, became the sole decision maker of what the limits of federal governmental powers would be, Americans would then live under a tyranny.”
https://mises.org/mises-wire/judicial-tyranny-tip-deep-state-sword