Democrats once killed a pipeline in the Northeast. Now they may help Trump revive it

By Evan Halper and Maxine Joselow

A decade ago, Democratic governors in New England cheered the demise of a plan to pipe natural gas from the shale fields of western Pennsylvania to population centers across the Northeast. But now, as President Donald Trump seeks to bring the project back from the dead, anxiety over energy costs has state leaders rethinking their opposition.

Electricity prices in the Northeast are 40 percent higher than the national average, federal data shows. Bowing to pressure from constituents fed up with higher utility bills and worried that cheap renewable energy is not coming online fast enough, some of the region’s Democratic governors are now signaling an openness to negotiating with Trump on the project, known as the Constitution Pipeline.

In New York, where regulators played a key role in initially killing the pipeline, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, spoke with Trump this month at the White House about the possibility of reviving it.

In Connecticut, which has aggressive goals for moving its power grid off fossil fuels, Gov. Ned Lamont, also a Democrat, recently met with senior Trump administration officials about bringing more gas to the state.

And in Maine, which has a goal of running on 100 percent renewable electricity by 2040, Democratic Gov. Janet Mills is resisting proposals to ban new gas infrastructure.

At the same time, Trump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright have repeatedly called for expediting the permitting process for the 124-mile Constitution Pipeline from Pennsylvania to a hub of smaller pipelines near Albany, New York.

They have suggested it could be one of the first projects to benefit from Trump’s executive orders declaring a national “energy emergency” and creating a White House council tasked with fast-tracking new energy infrastructure nationwide.

To be sure, it remains uncertain whether the Constitution Pipeline will ever be built, even if a bipartisan coalition of political leaders throws its weight behind the effort.

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Pipelines are typically a 30-to-40-year investment, and developers that already lost hundreds of millions of dollars on their first attempt worry that New England’s appetite for gas will subside as more wind, solar and nuclear power become available.

And environmental groups remain fiercely opposed, complicating the path in states where they have considerable influence.

Even so, the Constitution is one of several “zombie” gas pipeline projects across the country that Trump is trying to resurrect after promising on the campaign trail to bring down energy prices and tackle soaring electricity demand. Some of these projects are more viable than others.

The developer of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canadian tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries, for instance, canceled the controversial project in 2021 and said in a recent statement that it has “moved on.”

The company behind the Line 5 pipeline from Wisconsin to Ontario, in contrast, is making progress toward relocating a key segment after years of delays under the Biden administration and legal challenges from Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

The new momentum behind the pipeline comes as Democrats reckon with voter defections in low-income communities grappling with high energy costs, as detailed in a February report by the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left think tank.

It highlighted how energy costs were a significant concern driving votes in poor, predominantly Black communities in the Boston area, where Trump notched gains in November.

“If you’re a poor resident of public housing in, say, Boston or Dorchester and Roxbury, it’s really hard for you to see the benefits of tax credits for heat pumps” or other policies aimed at curbing fossil fuel use, said Elan Sykes, the report’s author. “This is really something that we as Democrats need to recognize.”

Limited gas supply has left many New England voters reliant on home heating oil in the winter, driving up their costs, the report says.

“They’re burning more oil and burning more coal in New England than ever before because they refuse to put a natural gas pipeline in, and their prices are going up,” said former Democratic senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, the co-chair of Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future, an advocacy group seeking to build support for gas among liberal voters. “These politicians need to change or they won’t be holding their offices very long.”

A long battle

First proposed in 2013, the Constitution Pipeline has become a case study for many gas industry executives for why it takes too long to approve new U.S. energy infrastructure.

That includes executives at the pipeline giant Williams, which lost hundreds of millions of dollars when the project was canceled last time but is mulling another attempt if Trump and the governors can fast-track permits.

“That project has been raised by the administration as an example of kind of the lunacy of not building critical infrastructure that has incredible merit,” said Chad Zamarin, an executive vice president at Williams. “We are using it as an opportunity to highlight the fact that for the last 10 years, we really haven’t built infrastructure in the Northeast.”

In 2014, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the Constitution Pipeline and authorized the companies to seize land from property owners along its route - a process known as eminent domain.

Amid lawsuits and regulatory battles, a blue state put the nail in the coffin. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in 2016 denied a key water quality permit for the project, saying the companies had failed to show that it wouldn’t harm pristine trout streams.

After unsuccessfully appealing this decision all the way to the Supreme Court, the companies abandoned the project in 2020, saying it was no longer economically or logistically feasible.

Fast forward to 2025 and the project is once again back in the national spotlight, this time with Trump asserting it would address a burgeoning “energy crisis” in the region.

“It’s a pipeline that will bring down the energy prices in New York and in all of New England,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last month, suggesting support from governors. “It should’ve been done years ago.”

Hochul’s office told reporters that her meeting with Trump was “productive” - a comment that some energy analysts interpreted as signaling openness to a deal.

“A climate-forward, blue-state Governor like Hochul might be persuaded to consider supporting a Constitution revival,” analysts with the research firm ClearView Energy Partners wrote in a recent note to clients. “Trump might conceivably try to strike a bargain with Hochul, perhaps by trading pipeline approvals for another energy-relevant result” such as ending the Trump administration’s pause on permitting offshore wind projects, they wrote.

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, who boasted of helping to stop Constitution in the past, is also under increasing pressure to ease her opposition.

Boston has some of the highest energy prices in the country, as offshore wind projects intended to bring relief are beset with delays, cost overruns and a permitting pause imposed by the Trump administration.

Healey’s spokesperson, Karissa Hand, said in a statement that the Massachusetts governor “will review any energy proposals through the lens of whether they would lower costs and move us toward energy independence.”

Officials close to her who were not authorized to speak publicly said that includes proposals for more natural gas infrastructure, as long as ratepayers don’t risk getting saddled with a huge bill for pipeline construction.

Environmental groups hope to prevail on the governors, however, warning that new gas projects would lock Northeast states into reliance on fossil fuels for decades to come.

“If we want to have a prayer of hitting our climate goals, we just have to stop building new big interstate pipelines,” said Alex Beauchamp, Northeast region director of Food and Water Watch. “We have to stop digging the hole and making the problem worse.”

Many landowners along the pipeline’s path in New York and northeastern Pennsylvania also remain opposed to the project. While Trump said last month that the administration would “rather not have to do eminent domain,” some landowners say they won’t leave for any amount of compensation.

“Nothing has changed on our end - my family has no interest in signing an easement agreement and certainly won’t,” said Megan Holleran, whose family’s land in New Milford Township, Pennsylvania, was temporarily taken by eminent domain in 2016.

Holleran said her family’s maple syrup business was devastated when the companies behind Constitution clear-cut more than 500 maple trees. Today, she said, the saplings are just starting to grow back.