If the Fish and Wildlife Service were to issue a new permit, Dominion has said it would begin building the pipeline from Buckingham County to the southeastern Virginia coast, connecting it to Hampton Roads and extending it through eastern North Carolina.

The company plans to build a natural gas compressor station at Union Hill in Buckingham under a state air pollution permit that environmental groups also have appealed to the 4th Circuit.

Separately, Dominion and its partners have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review another opinion by the same federal appeals panel last December that threw out a U.S. Forest Service permit to allow the pipeline to cross beneath the Appalachian Trail between Augusta and Nelson counties. In its petition to the high court, the pipeline company called the Forest Service decision “part of a pattern of decisions by the Fourth Circuit ... finding fault after fault in the arduous approval process for pipelines.”

If the pipeline company and Forest Service were to prevail at the Supreme Court, Dominion has said it would begin building the pipeline through western Virginia, across the Blue Ridge Mountains and into Buckingham.