Despite Mountain Valley developers’ hopes of completing the project by the end of 2021, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality recently told federal officials that it won’t be able to issue a new water quality permit for the project’s stream crossings before December, according to Virginia Mercury.
“Based on the complexity of this project and past public controversy, we cannot reasonably issue the (Virginia Water Protection) permit before December 2021 and we believe it is quite likely that we could not issue this permit until early 2022,” wrote DEQ Water Permitting Division Director Melanie Davenport in a March 25 letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The Mountain Valley Pipeline had previously sought to use a blanket permit to authorize all stream crossings but changed its approach in January following legal challenges and broader uncertainty regarding the permit’s future.
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