It’s just a nine-hour drive from the natural-gas-rich Marcellus Shale of western Pennsylvania to downtown Manchester, N.H. Yet, during the coldest months of winter, many New Englanders keep warm using natural gas shipped in from Trinidad and Tobago, just off the coast of Venezuela, 2,300 miles away.
Why? Geography.
LNG tankers don’t have to cross the state lines of Massachusetts or New York.
Blue state governors like Maura Healey (D-Mass.) and Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) have bragged about stopping pipelines from carrying domestic natural gas to New England customers.
“Remember, I stopped two gas pipelines from coming into this state,” Healey said in October 2022 when she was the state’s attorney general.
But the blockade of Pennsylvania natural gas to energy-starved New England may have been broken.
On Monday, the Trump administration announced it’s withdrawing a stop-work order holding up a $5 billion wind power project off the coast of Long Island.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, it’s part of a deal with Hochul that will allow the development of two natural gas pipelines in her state.
One is the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) project, which will bring natural gas to New York City. The other is the Constitution Pipeline, which will send natural gas from the Marcellus Shale to the Northeast. New York’s refusal to issue a permit eventually led the Constitution Pipeline’s developer, the Williams Company, to abandon the project in 2020.
“That project has been raised by the administration as an example of kind of the lunacy of not building critical infrastructure that has incredible merit,” Chad Zamarin, an executive vice president at Williams, told The Washington Post. “We are using it as an opportunity to highlight the fact that for the last 10 years, we really haven’t built infrastructure in the Northeast.”
Natural gas is absolutely vital to New Hampshire, where it already generating 25 percent of the state’s electricity. It’s also a cleaner, lower-carbon alternative to the heating oil used by more than 40 percent of Granite Staters to heat their homes.
Hochul has not publicly admitted that she’s entered a deal with the Trump administration. Instead, she’s simply said she “reaffirmed that New York will work with the administration and private entities on new energy projects that meet the legal requirements.”
But Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is already praising Hochul’s new stance.
“I am encouraged by Gov. Hochul’s comments about her willingness to move forward on critical pipeline capacity. Americans who live in New York and New England would see significant economic benefits and lower utility costs from increased access to reliable, affordable, clean American natural gas.”
Hochul’s move is a major reversal from a progressive New York governor who ran for office on a net-zero carbon pledge.
At the same time, energy costs in the Northeast have continued to rise, and increasing demand for electricity has outstripped supply. As a result, some Democrats were already backsliding from their deep-blue green-energy politics.
Connecticut Democrat Gov. Ned Lamont has been saying for weeks he’s open to working with the administration.
“The president and I will never agree about wind power and solar power, nor will we agree about coal and even oil, but perhaps in the area of natural gas and nuclear there are some ways that we can work together to potentially bring down dramatically the prices of electricity in our state and region,” Lamont said.
Even Massachusetts is relaxing some of its green activism as the Healey administration delays enforcement of minimum electric truck sales requirements for dealers in the state.
Polling conducted in March by the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance Foundation found that 47 percent of the state’s voters support building more natural gas pipelines.
The shift in blue state energy politics is good news for New England consumers, said Patrick Henderson, the vice president of Government Affairs and Communications for the Marcellus Shale Coalition.
“Perhaps there is a bit of reckoning with the Democratic Party and its leadership that needs to occur,” Henderson said. “Perhaps they learned last fall that their strident ‘just say no’ approach on energy just can’t work. It’s not sustainable; it’s not feasible for success.”
