By Bill Rettew, Daily Local News, Exton, PA, Jan 18, 2020

WEST CHESTER — As part of a last-minute Hail Mary pass to stop the controversial Mariner East pipeline project, the Chester County Commissioners Friday filed a court injunction to stop construction on the project in two county-owned locations, including around the Chester County Library in Exton.

The petition for injunctive relief, filed in Common Pleas Court, is a bid to curtail open trench construction on county property, at both the library and in the vicinity of the Chester Valley Trail through West Whiteland, slated to start on Jan. 24.

“Energy Transfer’s notice is extremely premature because it completely ignores the pending legal action initiated by Chester County against Sunoco Pipeline, LP, regarding construction of the Mariner East pipeline on County property,” said county Commissioners’ Chairwoman Marian Moskowitz. “That legal action — the lawsuit against Sunoco, LP — is currently in the Chester County Court of Common Pleas, and that is why we have filed today’s Petition for Injunctive Relief.”

See the entire article here:

https://www.dailylocal.com/news/local/chester-county-seeks-injunction-to-halt-pipeline-construction-at-sites/article_40f65d70-39f3-11ea-b9cf-2bc7756b56c3.html

From Robert Smith, Valliant News, November 16, 2019

Any day now, a pipeline company will arrive on Ralph Blume’s land in southern Pennsylvania to remove a hay shed. The shed sits on the route of the new Mariner East 2 pipeline, which Sunoco is building to transport natural gas liquids to the East Coast and abroad.

Blume, 76, doesn’t plan to make it easy for Sunoco contractors. “I’ll sit in the damn building, and they can go to hell,” he said, one week after he watched Sunoco contractors cuts down trees on his farm.

To make way for the pipeline, Sunoco has offered landowners payments ranging from several thousand dollars to six figures. Many have accepted the monetary offer and are preparing for a hazardous liquids pipeline to be dug through their farms and yards. Others are refusing, and learning that they have little say in the matter.

Eminent domain is often used by governments to gain right-of-way for projects such as highways or government buildings. But state and federal regulators who authorize pipeline projects that are building them the right to use eminent domain to secure needed right-of-way.

In Pennsylvania, seven major pipeline projects are under construction or regulatory review. One of the most controversial is the Mariner East 2, which would add two pipelines along the route of the Mariner East 1 pipeline in the southern part of the state.

Built in the 1930s, this pipeline formerly shipped petroleum east to west from Sunoco’s Marcus Hook refinery, near Pennsylvania’s border with Delaware.

Sunoco briefly started idling the refinery in 2011. The next year, Energy Transfer Partners – the same company that’s building the Dakota Access pipeline – purchased Sunoco and soon came up with a novel way to repurpose the old pipeline.

Energy Transfer recognized that fracking in the Marcellus shale formation in Pennsylvania and West Virginia was producing a glut of what’s known as “natural gas liquids” – products such as propane, ethane and butane. It also knew there was a demand for these liquids in Europe, particularly among plastics manufacturers and gasoline refiners.

So the company re-engineered its pipeline to run west to east, and started transferring natural gas liquids to Marcus Hook, where they were being loaded into ships heading to Europe.

It is unclear how much of the product is being distributed abroad versus locally. “That is proprietary shipper information,” spokesman Jeffrey Shields wrote in an email response.

That means rural and suburban landowners from Pennsylvania to the Dakotas are finding it increasingly difficult to combat an ever-growing network of pipelines that companies are racing to build to accommodate the prodigious amounts of oil and natural gas that fracking is producing.

“You can’t refuse them,” said Blume, because they have that court order.”

We visited residents across the state who are standing up to Sunoco. Their stories are compiled into the interactive video above.

Shown in a photo by Brittany Peterson McClatchy, Ellen Gerhart sits on tree that Sunoco cut down on her family’s property in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, on April 24, 2017. Like other pipeline companies, Sunoco has been authorized to use eminent domain to take control of private property needed for its Mariner East 2 pipeline project.

https://valliantnews.com/2019/11/16/pennsylvanians-speak-out-about-losing-their-land-to-a-sunoco-pipeline/