The developers of a new natural gas project have completed their application with New York environmental regulators to bury 17 miles of pipeline below the ocean floor near Staten Island and the Rockaways.
The proposal from a subsidiary of the Oklahoma-based Williams Companies comes less than two months after President Donald Trump said he’d revived the project to deliver fracked gas from Pennsylvania after negotiations with Gov. Kathy Hochul. New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation had rejected the project in 2020 because it did not comply with water quality regulations.
Williams did not respond to an inquiry. On its website, the company pitches the Northeast Supply Enhancement as “more than just an infrastructure upgrade; it’s a strategic investment in the region’s energy future.”
Williams provides one-third of the nation’s natural gas. The company said the project could be completed by winter 2027 and deliver enough natural gas to power 2.3 million homes.
“As demand continues to grow, especially in densely populated areas like Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island, so too must the capacity to deliver reliable energy,” the company said.
The proposal follows last week’s heatwave that strained New York City’s electrical grid. More than 100,000 Con Edison customers lost power for an average of four hours. Experts said the stress on the grid was due in part to New York’s retirement of fossil fuel-burning power sources without having a clean energy source ready to make up for the loss of energy.
Environmental advocates were ready to fight the pipeline project once again.
“The math is clearer than ever: every new pipeline locks us into fossil fuels we can’t afford,” said Katherine Nadeau, a deputy executive director at Environmental Advocates NY. “The cost isn’t abstract — it’s rising asthma rates, flooded homes, and billions spent rebuilding communities already hit by climate disaster. New York knows better. It’s time to act like it.”
Project documents show the proposed pipeline would travel below the ocean floor of Raritan Bay, east of the Staten Island coast, and south of the Rockaway peninsula, where it would connect with existing infrastructure.
The new application will also have to meet state climate regulations, which require the state to be powered by 70% renewable energy by this decade.
The application notes that mitigation will be necessary to “offset unavoidable impacts to benthic resources, including shellfish.” The ocean floor has a plethora of life, including fish, sea grass and worms.
“ These pipeline projects, when they are advanced, they lock our state and our country into a future that is based on dirty old fossil fuels,” Nadeau said. “New Yorkers are working to build a clean and healthy energy future that powers our economy, that powers our communities, and pipelines have no place in that.”
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found in 2020 that the previous incarnation of the project would cost more than $1 billion to build. Under the terms of that proposal, ratepayers in Long Island, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island would collectively pay nearly $193 million per year for the next 15 years to cover the construction costs of the new pipeline, according to the institute.
The pipeline project first came up in March, when Hochul and Trump were negotiating over the White House’s opposition to congestion pricing. During those talks, Trump said he wanted the Northeast Supply Enhancement, as well as a second project upstate called the Constitution pipeline, to be built.
“ I hope we don’t have to use the extraordinary powers of the federal government to get it done,” Trump said at the time. “If we have to, we will, but I don’t think we’ll have to.”
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is accepting public comments on the new proposal through Aug. 1.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
