A Georgia property owner says a multibillion-dollar gas pipeline project took a troubling turn when its route was changed to avoid land owned by a longtime Southern Co. employee, while expanding the easement across his own property.
Here's what to know
Donnie Peek said he had no immediate issue when Southern Natural Gas proposed a new gas line in 2024: with a pipeline already crossing his Fortson, Georgia, land, placing another one in that corridor initially "made sense," as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
That view changed after the company released its final alignment. The segment through his area was moved off the existing easement on several neighboring parcels and redrawn to run only through Peek's property.
Peek said the revision immediately raised red flags because the new path skips land owned by Chris Lane, a 25-year Southern Co. employee who manages Plants Addison and Franklin.
"That's when I said, 'Well, this thing smells,'" Peek said.
Southern Natural Gas, a joint venture between Kinder Morgan and Southern Co., denied that Lane received any special treatment. The company said the revised route directly affected one landowner instead of four and "best balances overall landowner impacts with the project's operational needs."
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More background
The project — known as Southern System Expansion 4 — would add to a 7,600-mile gas network linking gas supply basins in Texas with Florida, South Carolina, and Tennessee. A fact sheet for the SSE4 project describes it as providing "critical reliability to the Southeastern grid," while Kinder Morgan executive Allen Fore called it "a big, important project for the region," according to the Journal-Constitution.
The expansion comes as the Southeast's data center boom drives up electricity demand, with utilities including Georgia Power relying more on gas-fired generation to meet it.
Peek also argues the change makes little business sense. Using existing rights-of-way can save time and money, he said, yet this reroute adds roughly 1,400 feet of pipe and millions of dollars in costs. Kinder Morgan did not say whether those added expenses could ultimately be passed on to gas customers.
In an affidavit filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Aug. 28, Peek argued that the original route "would have effectively eliminated the destruction of thousands of trees, shortened the pipe and more fairly shared the burden of the pipeline easement among the surrounding landowners."
What's being done?
Even though the overall pipeline project has already received final approval, Peek has asked FERC to rehear his case.
Before that filing, a March 16 letter from Kinder Morgan's Land and Right-of-way Department rejected his request, saying a return to the earlier route would "impact landowners and potentially more landowners," the Journal-Constitution reported.
Southern Natural Gas said it would consider restoring the original route if Peek could get neighboring landowners to agree. The company offered $300,000 for additional easement rights, which Peek said would have been divided among the affected property owners.
Peek said he could not reach two nearby landowners, and he said the company offered him the full amount if he agreed to keep the line entirely on his property.
The dispute grew more contentious after Peek learned that Lane had proposed separate alternative routes to Kinder Morgan, including one that would bypass the neighborhood altogether. In an Aug. 6 email to Peek, Lane wrote, "I followed up several times but never got any real answers on why this wouldn't work."
"It's not about the money, it's just the fact that one person was involved getting it moved on my property instead of getting it to pass by his house," Peek said.
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