Energy Development in New Hampshire may be Making a Turn in the Right Direction

Craig Stevens
Sep 6, 2018 · 2 min read

Early this summer the New Hampshire Senate notched a small but symbolic victory. In a near unanimous vote, lawmakers from both parties endorsed the Granite Bridge Pipeline, a small natural gas line that will connect a storage facility in Epping with two larger existing pipelines. While modest next to the energy development happening nationwide, the project’s early support signals a shift in attitudes toward much-needed pipeline infrastructure.

For years the Northeast corridor has remained a holdout against the United States’ shale boom. Drawing largely from division along political lines, activists have been successful in disrupting infrastructure in the region by implementing a playbook of bureaucratic stonewalling, litigation and protest. Their tactics have disrupted and often derailed critical projects — t he Constitution and Northern Access pipelines in New York, the Northeast Energy Direct pipeline in Massachusetts, and the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley pipelines in Appalachia.

The result of this oppositional mentality has been a shortage of fuel supplies to homes and businesses in the Northeast, particularly during winter. In New England, which gets half its power from natural gas, prices spiked more than 400 percent during the “Polar Vortex” in 2014. Last winter, gas prices rose more than 60 times recent rates, and Boston had to import liquified natural gas from Russia due to bottlenecks — a first in U.S. history.

A recent report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found residents in the Northeast pay 44 percent more for electricity and nearly 30 percent more for natural gas, and regional manufacturers face costs that are 64 percent higher than the national average. This economic burden, which owes largely to pipeline constraints, is self-induced. Well-funded opposition campaigns and not-in-my-backyard policies have ensured that the more than 50,000 miles of natural gas pipelines built over the last decade have missed the North Atlantic.

Please read the entire piece at New Hampshire Journal.

Craig Stevens

Written by

Former senior adviser to U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, current spokesman for the GAIN Coalition. Twitter: @GAINNowAmerica & @Stevens_NH