Supreme Court Rejects Columbia Gas Storage Field Case
From Law360:
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to review a Sixth Circuit ruling that a TC Energy Corp. unit didn’t need landowner permission to access an underground natural gas storage facility with a valid Federal Energy Regulatory Commission operating certificate.
Landowners whose property sits atop Columbia Gas Transmission LLC’s storage field near Medina, Ohio, claimed the Sixth Circuit wrongly held in July that the Natural Gas Act doesn’t require companies that hold FERC certificates for storage fields to acquire the property they need for those fields. That means companies have the right to use that land without getting the go-ahead from landowners first, the appeals court said.
In urging the Supreme Court to reject the landowners’ petition, Columbia argued that the dispute is a matter of state law, not the NGA, and that the landowners never even raised the federal law issue in the lower court.
The dispute stretches back to 2013, when 29 landowners rejected a compensation offer from Columbia in relation to its Medina storage field, for which the company had a certificate of public convenience and necessity since 1958, according to the landowners’ Oct. 8 petition for writ of certiorari.Read on by clicking here.