The natural gas industry added 2400 miles of new pipeline to the nation’s network in 2011. Although this seems like an extraordinary amount – almost enough to stretch across the country – it is actually only slightly above average for the last decade. The years 2008 and 2009 saw a large upsurge in order to accommodate the new shale gas development in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The 2008 construction was almost triple last year.

In 2001, five big projects - Golden Pass, Ruby Pipeline, FGT Phase VIII, Pascagoula Expansion, and Bison Pipeline – accounted for 80 percent of new interstate construction. Most of these are opening up new territory in the South and West. The Midwest and Northeast are already so crisscrossed with pipelines that new construction usually involves only building better linkages between existing pipelines. Most of this construction has been in California, Florida and the Northeast.

The red dots on the map represent small intrastate construction projects for 2011. The red lines are large interstate efforts. The gray lines are existing pipeline, which darken the map along the Gulf Coast, in Oklahoma, around Chicago and in the Ohio/Western Pennsylvania/ West Virginia/upstate New York corridor. There are approximately 20,000 miles of gathering pipelines and 278,000 miles of transmission pipelines in the United States. When all the lines delivering gas from main lines into people’s homes are included, the mileage adds up to 1.8 million. Since gas pipelines are more dangerous than oil, since they can leak and cause explosions, it makes you wonder why there is such a fuss over building the 2,147-mile Keystone XL Pipeline.