Planned protests change FERC meeting schedule

OREANDA-NEWS. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has decided to hold its next open meeting a week early because of safety concerns related to protests that environmental activists plan for later this month.

Advocacy group Beyond Extreme Energy has been planning for months to hold protests at FERC's headquarters in Washington, DC, that would begin on 21 May, the scheduled date for the panel's next open meeting. The group expected 500 or more protesters will come to the week-long protests, which are focused on the environmental impact of FERC's infrastructure licensing decisions.

But FERC said that at the recommendation of the Federal Protective Service, a division of the US Department of Homeland Security, it had decided to move its regular monthly meeting to 14 May to "better ensure the safety of its staff and the public" during the protests that are planned for the following week.

The commission holds open meetings once a month at a predetermined schedule, typically to highlight decisions for the most prominent cases under review. The meetings are open to the press and public. Activists with Beyond Extreme Energy have frequently interrupted the start of open meetings this year over concerns about the environmental impact of pipelines and LNG facilities that FERC licenses.

Security staffers at recent open meetings have had to forcibly remove many protesters, who have focused on the licensing of the Dominion Resources-owned Cove Point LNG export terminal in Maryland.

FERC on 6 May rejected requests by BP and environmental groups to hold a rehearing of its approval of the Cove Point project. Cove Point is on schedule to become the second operating LNG export facility in the contiguous US in late 2017.

Beyond Extreme Energy said that FERC, in moving its meeting, was trying to "avoid having to deal with people who are angry about FERC's rubber-stamping ways" and are deeply concerned about climate change. It called FERC "dishonest and deceitful" in citing safety concerns as the reason for changing the meeting schedule, as the group says it has always been non-violent.

FERC chairman Norman Bay at the agency's last monthly meeting urged protesters to stop disrupting meetings, noting that any comments provided at the meetings are considered ex parte communications that are not entered into the rulemaking record. But his pleas for them to file comments in the relevant regulatory docket failed to quell further disruptions.

Environmental groups in recent years pushed FERC to include all possible impacts of natural gas pipelines and LNG export facilities in its decision-making, contending that new infrastructure enables more natural gas production and consumption, with a resulting increase in carbon emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency has endorsed that view of cumulative effects of infrastructure projects.

But FERC has refused to consider cumulative impacts of projects, instead limiting environmental reviews to direct and indirect impacts of specific infrastructure projects, rather than future effects. FERC has argued that cumulative air impacts are "unknowable," meaning it cannot meaningfully calculate all hypothetical impacts of an individual project.