The US supreme court has allowed construction to resume on the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline, which is a project to transport fracked gas 300 miles through West Virginia and Virginia.
The new ruling clears the way for construction to restart, lifting stays from lower courts that had halted work.
The $6.6bn pipeline has been long opposed by environmentalists and enmeshed in legal challenges for years due to opposition from grassroots groups and landowners.
Work on the Mountain Valley pipeline had most recently blocked by the federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, even after Congress ordered the project’s approval as part of the bipartisan bill to increase the debt ceiling.
Thursday’s ruling will be welcomed by the West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin, its most high-profile champion. Manchin was involved in securing backing from the Biden administration for it during talks around the debt ceiling bill last month, despite objections from environmentalists.
That deal, which Biden signed into law last month, singles out the pipeline as being “required in the national interest” and therefore should be allowed to proceed, shielded from any future judicial review.
The expediting of the pipeline provoked outrage from activists as well as some Democratic allies of Biden, with Tim Kaine, the senator from Virginia, complaining last month that he “strongly opposes” the decision to “green-light this pipeline without normal administrative and judicial review and ignore the voices of Virginians”.
Backers of the pipeline say it is designed to meet growing energy demands in the south and mid-Atlantic by transporting gas from the Marcellus and Utica fields in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Mountain Valley pipeline say the work is largely complete, except for a three-mile section that cuts through the Jefferson national forest.
Last month a protest over the pipeline was held outside the White House under smoky skies due to the wildfires in Canada.
Environmentalists have welcomed the Biden administration’s climate spending and landmark IRA legislation but have been dismayed by decisions by the administration to back the Mountain Valley pipeline, allow the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska and a buildout of gas export facilities on the Gulf of Mexico coast.
The International Energy Agency has made clear that there can be no new fossil fuel infrastructure built if the world is to avoid disastrous global heating.
Associated Press contributed to this report
