Opinion ID: 106161
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: postulates on which the commission should have proceeded.

Text: Without purporting to exhaust the full reach of its discretion, the premises on which the Commission, in my view, should have proceeded will be now indicated. Basically, I think it was open to the Commission to decide whether the particular transportation service before it would tend to waste gas, unduly pre-empt pipeline capacity, or raise field prices. I think the Commission can properly assert this more limited power as an incident of its transportation certificating powers. [5] It is quite true of course that Consolidated Edison need not have resorted to the Federal Power Commission if the purchase transaction had been possible without the interstate transportation of the gas in jurisdictional pipelines, since this was not a purchase of natural gas for resale. Note 1, supra. However, it does not follow that the Commission had to blind itself to the effects of the purchase and use of the gas when its authority to certificate the transportation of the gas was invoked. To recognize that the transaction was, as a practical matter, impossible without the use of jurisdictional facilities for the interstate transportation of the purchased gas is to acknowledge that this transportation is as integral a part of the transaction as was the sale itself. Whether the adverse effect of the transaction be a waste of a scarce resource, or pre-emption of pipeline capacity, or a substantial boosting of field prices, the transportation is as responsible for the effects as is the original sale. I see no reason why the Commission must certify, as in accord with the public convenience and necessity, transportation which tends materially to further such undesirable results which are within the area of the Commission's legitimate concern when it is considering the public convenience and necessity of certificating a jurisdictional sale. Assuming that it is results only made possible by jurisdictional transportation that the Commission wishes to consider, an attempted distinction between transportation and sale certification proceedings simply obscures the important question: what undesirable results are envisioned by § 1 (b) to be the concern of the States and not the concern of the Federal Power Commission? We hold in this case that the economic waste of natural gas that might otherwise be available for jurisdictional transactions ending in superior uses is such a legitimate concern. Similar considerations pertain to the pre-emption of pipeline capacity. Note 4, supra. Finally, we have held in Atlantic Refining Co. v. Public Service Comm'n, 360 U. S. 378, that the Commission must consider the effect on field prices for future jurisdictional sales of an excessive purchase price. Asserting power to consider these effects does not involve assuming jurisdiction over matters that Congress has reserved to the States in § 1 (b), for it does not involve protecting citizens of either the producing or consuming State against harms that local regulatory bodies have the power to prevent. These effects being the legitimate concern of the Federal Power Commission, they are no less so in a certification proceeding for transportation than in such a proceeding for the sale of natural gas. Each of these effects, if materially furthered by the transportation being considered, can properly be relied upon, on a case-by-case basis, in the denial of a transportation certificate.