A Pipeline to Somewhere

Only the timing was uncertain. Otherwise, it was plain as day that sometime this fall, Gov. Kathy Hochul would lift New York State’s hold on a new 24-mile pipeline intended to augment natural gas supplies in New York City and Long Island. Sure enough, the permits dropped on Nov. 7, while city and state lawmakers were in Puerto Rico at their annual post-Election Day huddle, pondering Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win.

The die was cast six months ago, in May, when President Trump told Hochul he would spare New York’s first big offshore wind power array, the 54-turbine Empire Wind 1 project in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Beach. The price? Hochul would reverse earlier rulings blocking the new gas pipeline on account of potential harms to the seabed beneath Lower New York Bay and the Rockaways.

Politics demanded the governor disclaim any quid pro quo. Despite knowing the tradeoff, New York climate activists torched her announcement. “Hochul hasn’t kept her promises to fight against skyrocketing energy bills or the climate crisis,” declared Food & Water Watch. “Hochul just did Trump’s bidding by approving the massive . . . fracked gas pipeline [that] will jack up our utility bills, pollute our air & water, and cook the climate,” thundered NY Communities for Change. In more measured terms, the Jewish Climate Action Network called the permitting “a major setback to our work on climate.”

But should a deal that recoups Empire Wind be deemed a setback? Those turbines will usher in a green energy hub on the Brooklyn waterfront and create well-paying jobs, while the extra gas provides a cushion against freezing winter weather. Just as importantly, the nascent offshore wind industry, unloosed from Trump’s detention, will, before long, offset much and perhaps all of the gas pipeline’s climate emissions. 

In short, for New York, Hochul’s deal with Trump could be more of a save than a cave.

NESE Pipeline and Empire Wind: Dimensions

The Northeast Supply Enhancement project, or NESE, is the 24-mile final segment of a new 130-mile pipeline from Pennsylvania gas-fracking country to a gas distribution node at Floyd Bennett Field in southern Brooklyn. The pipeline company, Williams/Transco, and the local gas utility, National Grid, maintain that NESE will help households and businesses withstand prolonged freezes and ensure that gas-fired electricity-generating plants — the mainstay of downstate power supply — have ample fuel year-round. In the company’s telling, NESE will also help New York City and Long Island retain and attract industry. 

Empire Wind is a wind turbine array designed by Equinor, a unit of Norway’s state oil company, awaiting installation on the Atlantic Ocean seabed 15 to 30 miles south of the Nassau County city of Long Beach, just east of Far Rockaway. It has two stages. Empire Wind 1, the phase that Trump greenlit, comprises 54 turbines capable of generating 810 megawatts. Empire Wind 2, with an additional 84 turbines totaling 1,260 MW, will bring the entire venture to 138 turbines and 2,070 MW.

Coincidentally, that megawatt total is roughly identical to that of Indian Point, the now-shuttered twin-unit 2,028-MW nuclear power plant tucked into Westchester County’s northwest corner, although wind variability will limit Empire Wind’s annual electricity output to around 45% of what Indian Point generated each year. That plant was closed in 2020-2021 in a deal engineered by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Hudson River advocacy organization Riverkeeper.

Indian Point is germane because the premature retirement of this zero-emission power source blew up the effort to decarbonize the New York grid, especially downstate, where, as recently as last year, electricity produced by renewable solar and wind facilities was dwarfed 15 to 1 by gas-fired generating plants. There’s an additional reason: Indian Point’s carbon benefit — the carbon dioxide that the plant previously forestalled by letting the grid ease up on power plants burning natural gas — provides a benchmark for evaluating the relative climate impacts of NESE, which will increase gas burning, and Empire Wind, which will reduce it.

Quantifying key NY State carbon emissions and reductions

To fairly evaluate the trade Hochul made, we need to carefully think through not only the additional energy that’ll be delivered (and the cost of that delivery), but the carbon emissions that NESE and Empire Wind will variously cause or prevent. Carbon emissions, of course, are the prime accelerant of global heating, and rapidly reducing them has long been the central objective of virtually every environmental actor in New York, from Gov. Hochul to the hundred or more NGOs that pushed through landmark state climate legislation in 2019. 

The respective sources’ carbon implications are also easily compared thanks to their interchangeability with natural gas. (That commonality lets us set aside NESE permitting’s impacts on emissions of methane, the number two greenhouse gas, since there’s no clear-cut difference between NESE and Empire Wind on that score; permitting NESE will necessarily add methane to our atmosphere, but building Empire Wind will curb it by substituting for gas-fired power.)

Indian Point: Over their final two decades, the two Indian Point reactors jointly generated nearly 16.5 billion kWh’s a year, equivalent to a phenomenal 92% capacity factor. In Indian Point’s absence, essentially every one of those kilowatt-hours must be generated by burning natural gas, mostly in relatively efficient but still carbon-emitting combined cycle power plants. Applying the customary emission factor (CO2 per kWh) for such plants, Indian Point’s closure is causing additional emissions of 6.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. 

Empire Wind: I lump EW 2 together with EW 1, on the premise that the visible success of the project’s first phase will enable the developer along with business and labor allies to fend off any attempt by the Trump administration to block the second. Assuming a 40% annual capacity factor — a figure reflecting seasonal and diurnal fluctuations in wind strength — the project is projected to generate 7.25 billion kWh’s a year, which otherwise would have to be produced in combined cycle plants burning natural gas. Using the CO2/kWh factor I employed above, I calculate that Empire Wind will avoid 2.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — a substantial amount, though not half as great as the carbon benefit Indian Point was providing.

NESE: Assessing pipeline-caused emissions isn’t as straightforward as calculating emissions avoided by offshore wind or Indian Point. The issue isn’t the emission factor for each unit of gas conveyed by the pipeline, which is known, but getting a read on how much additional fuel NESE will cause to be burned.

Two parameters are in play, and neither has been fully studied and reported. One is how the amount of gas NESE will deliver over the course of the year stacks up against its peak-day deliverability. The other is the extent to which NESE gas will constitute “new” (incremental) fuel resulting in additional emissions, rather than substituting for carbon fuels now being burned (for example, home heating oil, propane and gas from other sources), which would make seemingly new NESE emissions a “wash.”

Astoundingly, despite their numerical weight, neither parameter seems to have been quantified or even mentioned by state agencies. (An evaluation commissioned by the Department of Public Service addressed only trivial emission matters such as averted diesel truck trips delivering compressed natural gas.) Absent serious inquiry, I’ve had to draw on my utility economics background and intuition to make “guesstimates.”

The first variable is NESE’s annual utilization rate. Virtually all gas pipelines are sized for the coldest winter days and weeks, when heating needs spike not just in homes and apartments but also in stores, offices, factories and institutional buildings such as schools and hospitals. Absent hard, contrary information, I’ve defaulted to a 50% annual utilization rate. 

The second is NESE additivity vs. substitutability: I’ve selected 40% for this parameter after digesting the definitive scholarly article on “supply-side fossil fuel interventions,” by a team at Resources for the Future led by economist Brian Prest. 

That paper concluded that stopping a fossil-fuel expansion project such as NESE typically reduces fuel use and consequent emissions by only 40% to 50% of the theoretical, calculated amount. The remainder, they concluded, would have been extracted from somewhere else, delivered and burned anyway to satisfy ongoing demand. Conversely — or symmetrically — permitting an oil or gas expansion project will increase net usage by the same 40% to 50%.

The percentage is greater than zero — meaning, some NESE gas will be additional — because the pipeline will tend to lower the price of natural gas by bolstering its availability. While that will aid household and business budgets, the economics get complicated — because lower prices also tend to deter some conservation steps (e.g., lower thermostats) and efficiency measures (e.g., heat pumps) and switches to renewable energy (e.g., solar) by making them less profitable. I settled on the lower end of the range, 40%, on account of the relatively mature nature of fuel use in Long Island and New York City.

With these assumptions, the estimated CO2 emissions added by NESE pencil out to 1.6 million metric tons a year — more than will be reduced by Empire Wind 1 (1.1 million), roughly the same as will be reduced by Empire Wind 2 (1.7 million), and less than the two combined (2.7 million). (Not unimportantly, estimated NESE emissions are also a whopping 75% less than ongoing emissions each year from burning additional natural gas to make up for the lost output of Indian Point.)

Implications

This quantitative exercise validates Gov. Hochul’s compact with President Trump on climate grounds. If that deal’s only virtue were to guarantee Empire Wind 1 in return for NESE, its net climate cost would be an increase in CO2 emissions of half a million metric tons a year — not beanbag but not a backbreaker either. And on the strong likelihood that Empire Wind 1 does reel in Empire Wind 2 as well, then permitting NESE will have yielded a net CO2-avoidance benefit exceeding a million metric tons a year — a result equivalent to outfitting 200,000 houses with solar panels. Other, more palpable benefits will include enhanced gas-service and electricity reliability and the advent of a new, local green-energy sector. 

These findings should prompt questions about the strident state of New York climate activism. In pillorying Hochul for a deal she made with Trump — under duress — the state climate movement appears to be exaggerating its downsides (“major setback”; “cook the climate”) and overlooking prospective upsides. Their sniping risks harming Hochul’s re-election campaign next year, largely without cause.

Hochul isn’t immune to criticism over her climate record. But many of her actions merit praise for their climate value, among them a state-led program to expand nuclear power capacity, a halt to highway expansions in the Hudson Valley and the Bronx, and successfully defending congestion pricing from Trump. With the favorable outcomes from the NESE-Empire Wind deal in mind, her critics should calm down, step back and see the larger picture.

You can download the author's full calculations at komanoff.net/fossil/NESE.xlsx.