Pipeline Payday: How Builders Win Big, Whether Gas Is Needed or Not

"The real fight over America's energy future isn't in coal, despite the Trump administration's public focus on a mining revival. Rather, dozens of pipeline projects, making up one of the largest expansions of natural gas infrastructure in U.S. history, are where the fossil fuel action is.

At a cost of billions of dollars, these pipelines will tap the rich reservoir of fracked natural gas flowing out of the Marcellus-Utica shale basin that lies under much of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

The Trump administration and its allies, energy-dominance manifestoes in hand, are eager to see these projects approved as soon as the president's nominees to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) are confirmed by the Senate.

But are all these new gas pipelines really needed?"

Phil McKenna reports for InsideClimate News August 3, 2017.