Ella Rose had returned home from church on Sunday, ready to settle in for the afternoon, when her phone rang. It was a friend, Chad Oba, delivering unexpected news: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline, the proposed multibillion-dollar project that had consumed their lives for the past six years, was no more.
It was officially canceled.
"My reaction was 'hallelujah,'" Rose, 76, recalled Monday. "I was so elated that I started praising God."
After protracted legal conflicts and a wave of delays, the two energy companies partnering on the project, Dominion Energy in Richmond, Virginia, and Duke Energy in Charlotte, North Carolina, announced they were abandoning the joint venture, a natural gas pipeline that was supposed to zigzag about 600 miles through West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina.
It was a surprising twist in a fight that had included intense community opposition, a concession from the two companies that they couldn't overcome the ballooning cost of the project — which had nearly doubled to $8 billion from its original estimate of about $4.5 billion — and uncertainty surrounding the pipeline's possible completion in early 2022, which would have been an almost three-and-a-half-year delay. The high-stakes plan was formally proposed in 2014, and was expected to benefit from the Trump administration's efforts to roll back federal oversight and speed up the building of major infrastructure projects.
