Coos County, OR Wetlands: The Jordan Cove LNG Case Study

The proposed Jordan Cove LNG terminal and its 229-mile feeder pipeline would have crossed more than 300 wetlands, streams, and rivers on the way to Coos Bay -- and Oregon's wetland and water-quality permitting process is the specific reason the project ultimately failed. It's the clearest real-world illustration of how wetlands regulation actually functions in Coos County.

This page covers what's specific to Coos County. For the general explanation, see the national guide.

What was actually proposed, and where

Jordan Cove Energy Project L.P. proposed building a liquefied natural gas export terminal on 500 acres of Coos Bay's North Spit, directly across the bay from the Southwest Oregon Regional Airport. The terminal would have been fed by the Pacific Connector Gas Pipeline, a 36-inch-diameter pipeline running roughly 229 miles from an interconnection with the Ruby Pipeline and the Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN) Pipeline near Malin, Oregon, all the way to the coast. Along that route, the pipeline was designed to cross more than 300 individual wetlands, streams, and rivers, in addition to roughly 40 miles of land managed by the Bureau of Land Management and about 30.58 miles managed by the U.S. Forest Service across the Umpqua, Rogue River-Siskiyou, and Fremont-Winema national forests.

That sheer number of water-body crossings is why wetlands and stream permitting became the central regulatory battleground for the project, rather than a secondary consideration -- a pipeline this long, crossing this much sensitive terrain, inevitably runs into Oregon's Clean Water Act and removal-fill permitting requirements at dozens of points along its route, on top of the terminal site's own direct estuary-adjacent location.

DEQ's 2019 denial: the wetland-and-estuary decision that mattered most

On May 6, 2019, Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality denied Jordan Cove's application for a Clean Water Act Section 401 Water Quality Certification -- a state-level sign-off required before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers can issue federal construction permits for a project that crosses this many waters of the state. DEQ's stated reasons centered specifically on wetlands and water quality: the agency found the project would impact water temperature and cause sedimentation in streams and wetlands along the pipeline route, and separately flagged the risk of drilling fluids being released during construction of the pipeline's crossing beneath the Coos Bay estuary itself.

Because the Army Corps cannot issue its own Clean Water Act construction permits without this state certification in hand, DEQ's denial functioned as a practical veto over the entire project, even though DEQ itself noted the door wasn't fully closed -- the agency said Jordan Cove could reapply with additional information that might yield a different result. In practice, the company never overcame this wetland-and-estuary-crossing hurdle, and it remained the central unresolved obstacle through the project's final years.

Cancellation in 2021, and a long-shot 2025 revival attempt

After Oregon's water permit denials, the pipeline paused development around April-May 2021 to assess the state's regulatory posture, and Pembina -- which had acquired the project's original developer, Veresen -- formally asked FERC to cancel its federal certificate on December 1, 2021, ending Jordan Cove as an active project. That closed out roughly two decades of on-and-off proposals for an LNG export facility at this site, each one ultimately unable to clear Oregon's wetland, estuary, and water-quality permitting requirements.

The story hasn't entirely gone quiet: in 2025, a newly formed entity called OA Partners LLC filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, attempting to reverse FERC's original 2016 rejection of the underlying pipeline certificate. This is a long-shot legal maneuver rather than a sign of active construction planning, but it means the underlying federal certificate question isn't fully closed as a legal matter. If wetlands, estuary-crossing infrastructure, or the Jordan Cove site specifically come up in your research on Coos County land, understand that the project's practical death (2021) and this residual legal appeal (2025) are two different things.

Wetlands in Coos County, Oregon: The Jordan Cove LNG Case Study

What was actually proposed, and where

DEQ's 2019 denial: the wetland-and-estuary decision that mattered most

Cancellation in 2021, and a long-shot 2025 revival attempt

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