WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Donald Trump will meet New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Friday morning, the U.S. president said, for talks that may include potentially reviving the Constitution natural gas pipeline in the Northeast.
The pipeline would bring gas from Pennsylvania’s drilling fields to New York, but Williams Cos canceled the project in 2020 following opposition from politicians and environmentalists in New York.
Trump said a pipeline would lower the region’s energy prices.
But it remains uncertain how it could be approved.
“Kathy Hochul, very nice woman; she’s coming in tomorrow morning at nine o’clock to meet me on that and other things,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, in an apparent reference to the project.
“I hope we don’t have to use the extraordinary powers of the federal government to get it done.
But if we have to, we will, but I don’t think we’ll have to.”
Such pipelines are a top priority for Trump and the leaders of his Energy Dominance Council co-chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
Representatives for Williams did not respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this week, Hochul demanded Trump reverse U.S. tariffs on Canadian energy imports, arguing the tariffs and Canadian retaliatory actions threatened to drive up electricity and heating costs for New Yorkers.
“I reached out to the president yesterday and said I want to carry on the conversation that we had in the Oval Office a couple weeks ago,” Hochul told reporters.
“I have a lot on my agenda.
We talked about infrastructure, Penn Station. We talked about – he knows I want to talk about congestion pricing again. I want to talk about, you know, our concerns about energy in light of the tariffs.”
(Reporting by Steve Holland, Ryan Patrick Jones, Trevor Hunnicutt and Timothy Gardner; Editing by Chris Reese and Rod Nickel)
