U.S. LNG export capacity is poised to grow tremendously over the next few years, mostly near the Texas/Louisiana border. The gas-focused Haynesville Shale in northwestern Louisiana and northeastern Texas is a prime source of additional supply for those new and expanded terminals. But plans for new north-to-south pipelines to deliver incremental gas out of the Haynesville have been clouded by legal challenges. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss the reasons for the disputes, what’s been going on recently, and the potential fallout.

We’ve talked about LNG export operations and the pipes that will feed them in a number of blogs. Most recently, in our five-part Gotta Get Over series, we discussed plans for a slew of new pipeline projects in Louisiana, all of them tied in one way or another to LNG-related demand. In Come Dancing, we blogged about the race to build new gas pipelines out of the Permian Basin in West Texas, whose crude-oil-focused wells also generate large volumes of associated gas that need a home — like new LNG export facilities with a seemingly insatiable demand for gas.

Permian gas pipelines and Louisiana projects each face challenges, however. Pipelines from West Texas to the Gulf Coast — especially to the Texas/Louisiana border — need to cover hundreds of miles (which is not cheap), and some Permian-sourced gas has a nitrogen issue that’s problematic for LNG exporters. As for Louisiana, the state is already a spaghetti bowl of all kinds of pipelines, and lately there have been a handful of legal battles over Energy Transfer’s attempts to block other pipelines from crossing its own pipes, resulting in project delays.

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