Get Ready for an Appalachian Gas Bonanza

David Rheinlander used to dream of building a cabin in the woods behind his house in southwestern Pennsylvania. Now when the 57-year-old looks across his backyard, he sees a line of cut trees, piles of dirt, and stacks of steel pipe where he once envisioned a tiny cabin. For the past six months, construction crews carved their way through the back of his property. The roughly 100-foot-wide path they’re cutting through the rolling hills extends about 700 miles to the west, running through neighboring Ohio and all the way up into Michigan.

The pathway is for a pipeline that will bring huge amounts of natural gas out of sparsely populated Appalachia and into big cities across the Midwest. The pipeline, called Rover, is being built by Energy Transfer Partners LP, of Dallas, which has spent three years and a total $4.2 billion on the painstaking process of winning permits, clearing miles of rugged terrain, and fighting a pitched legal battle against environmental groups and landowners.