U.S. natural gas pipeline venture Mountain Valley asked federal regulators on Monday to authorize its Virginia pipeline project to be in service by June 11.
The company said in a filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that the final segments of the project were being purged and packed with natural gas.
Mountain Valley added in the filing that it had satisfied all aspects of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s Oct. 3, 2023, Consent Order (CO) that were necessary to commence service.
Officials at Mountain Valley were not immediately available for comment.
Last month, the company pushed back the target in-service date of its long-delayed pipe from West Virginia to Virginia to early June from the prior target of “prior to June 1”.
Meanwhile, earlier in May, the company said it repaired a segment of pipe that failed a water test.
The $7.85 billion Mountain Valley project is the only big gas pipeline under construction in the U.S. Northeast. It has encountered numerous regulatory and court fights that have stopped work several times since construction began in 2018.
The 303-mile (488-km) Mountain Valley project is owned by units of Equitrans, NextEra Energy, Consolidated Edison, AltaGas and RGC Resources. Equitrans will operate the pipeline.
(Reporting by Anushree Mukherjee and Rahul Paswan in Bengaluru; editing by Jonathan Oatis and David Gregorio)