Seeking to ease a two-year logjam, Mountain Valley Pipeline will restart a permitting process to cross nearly 500 streams and wetlands that remain as barriers to the completion of its natural gas pipeline.
The company said Tuesday that it will abandon its plan to use a blanket permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which allowed the pipe to be buried in trenches dug along the bottoms of water bodies before it was challenged in court.
Instead, it will apply for individual approvals for each open-cut crossing â a more costly and time-consuming process that will require new state and federal reviews of a project already swamped by legal and regulatory delays.