A view of part of the Sunoco Mariner East 2 pipeline project across Trough Creek Valley Road approaching Ellen and Stephen Gerhart’s property in Unity Tips, in Huntingdon County. Photo: Associated Press
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has rejected a series of appeals aimed at blocking Sunoco from taking private land for its Mariner East 2 pipeline project.
The high court on Monday denied allocatur in five cases where landowners were challenging the energy giant’s ability to use their land for the pipeline project, which is intended to carry thousands of barrels of natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica shales in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio to the Marcus Hook Industrial Complex in Delaware County and points in between.
Over the past 18 months, the landowners have seen a handful of unfavorable decisions from the Commonwealth Court, but attorneys for the plaintiffs told The Legal last year that they were hopeful that the appeals before the Supreme Court would keep their challenges alive.
The appeals that the Supreme Court rejected came in the cases involving Patricia and Thomas Perkins, Rolfe and Doris Blume, Homes for America, Stephen and Ellen Gerhart and Charles and Karen Katz.
In July, the Commonwealth Court rejected Glen Mills attorney Charles Katz’s challenge to Sunoco’s eminent domain action, specifically ruling that the Pennsylvania Utility Commission’s determination that a project is for a “public need” does not need to take into account the need to take each specific parcel.
That ruling came little more than a month after the court rejected another challenge to the project, this one brought by the Blumes, who challenged, among other things, the sufficiency of the bond Sunoco posted for the taking.
