Pipeline Compliance Inspections and Monitoring

Throughout the last several years Central Land Consulting (CLC) has worked closely with hundreds of landowners impacted by FERC regulated pipeline projects. CLC has monitored and inspected these projects from pre-construction to post construction documenting, reporting, and performing a wide range of environmental inspections. CLC has also engaged in continual communications with the FERC’s Office of Energy Projects regarding project issues, providing inspections and documentation of various projects along the way. Throughout this process, we have found FERC’s compliance program is broken because it lacks a systematic process for identifying, assessing and addressing infractions.  The lack of an objective guided system creates a culture of noncompliance under FERC’s watch. 

The current compliance program fails to create structure or accountability in ensuring factual and unbiased information that is being reported by the project sponsor. This system also fails to prioritize, organize, or verify compliance issues at any level of the project. This creates a stream of potentially neglected and uncredible information funneled to decision makers at FERC. On numerous occasions, the Commission has had to backtrack from initial determinations that relied on bad information from the project sponsor or the Office of Energy Projects itself. FERC staff’s current compliance program falls short of ensuring FERC’s regulatory responsibility creating significant impacts on landowners, the environment, the project sponsor, stakeholders, consumers, investors, and even exhausting FERC staff’s time and resources.

CLC offers ongoing services such as construction monitoring, advanced compliance inspections, environmental compliance and restoration determinations, as well as reporting our findings to FERC. We specialize in developing a record in supporting landowner rights and proper restoration of lands affected by FERC-regulated pipeline projects. We work to identifying all environmental and agricultural compliance deficiencies through detailed inspections. These inspections provide FERC with legitimate criteria that substantiates claims of compliance deficiencies and determines comprehensive remediation plans to ensure the impacted landowners properties are fully restored to it’s pre-construction conditions. CLC has been involved in almost 700 landowner matters at FERC since 2015 so we are very familiar and comfortable with the FERC process, rules and regulations.