New Report Debunks Manchin’s Lies About the Mountain Valley Fracked Gas Pipeline

As climate campaigners and frontline community leaders prepared to converge on Capitol Hill Thursday to rally against a federal permitting overhaul pushed by Sen. Joe Manchin, a newly released report aimed to debunk the West Virginia senator’s false claims about a long-stalled fracked gas pipeline that would likely benefit from the proposed reforms.

Titled Why Everything Manchin Says About the Mountain Valley Pipeline Is Wrong, the analysis by Oil Change International (OCI) spotlights and counters three prominent claims that Manchin has made about the pipeline project as he attempts to usher it toward completion despite the threat it poses to the environment and communities in its path.

One claim OCI targets is the notion that the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) could actually serve as a tool to fight the climate crisis, namely by displacing polluting coal facilities. As Manchin put it in an April statement, full approval of the pipeline set to run through his home state would enable the U.S. to “domestically produce the natural gas we need today and support our energy and climate goals for decades to come.”

OCI responds that “if MVP is completed, it would add tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution to the atmosphere every year for decades to come.”

“These emissions would come from pipeline operations, methane gas leakage, and end users burning the pipeline’s gas,” report notes. “The United States has pledged to reduce GHG emissions at least 50% from 2005 levels by 2030. Manchin and MVP’s owners try to resolve this contradiction by assuming the pipeline will help the Southeast replace coal-fired power with gas-fired power, ignoring the fact that cheap, clean renewable energy is increasingly displacing coal and gas.”

“The pipeline would have to substantially displace coal emissions over and above the emissions it causes,” the report continues. “MVP’s operators ultimately plan to expand the pipeline’s capacity—and thus its emissions—by 25%. This means MVP would need to replace 25 coal plants by 2030… That’s a tall order for one pipeline.”

Also, OCI rejects the narrative pushed by Manchin and other pipeline apologists that a completed and operational MVP would help free up gas for export to western European nations—which are currently attempting to wean themselves off Russian fossil fuels—and meet supposedly growing gas needs in the U.S.

“Expanding existing terminals or building new ones will take several years,” OCI replies. “Even if the United States builds new export capacity, it will arrive far too late to help European allies.”

Besides, as for the claim that regions of the U.S., particularly the Southeast, are in need of gas that MVP, OCI may supply, report says that the existing pipelines already well serve the demand in the Southeast, the region MVP would serve.

Lorne Stockman, OCI’s research co-director at Oil Change International and a co-author of the new report, said in a statement Thursday that Democratic leaders must “understand that Manchin’s desire to see the Mountain Valley Pipeline completed is based on his fossil fuel donors’ interests rather than any value the pipeline actually has for U.S. or European energy security or the climate.”

“MVP is a false solution looking for a problem,” said Stockman. “It’s out of date and out of time.”

Originally published at Commondreams.org.