Building a better east: upcoming infrastructure projects will continue eastern North Carolina's recent string of economic successes.

• Position: SPONSORED SECTION: REGIONAL REPORT: EASTERN NORTH CAROLINA

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline will start in West Virginia, travel a yet-to-be determined path through Virginia and terminate in North Carolina's Robeson County. It will carry natural gas pulled from the Marcellus Shale formation in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Its builders--Atlanta-based AGL Resources Inc., Richmond, Va.-based Dominion Resources Inc. and Piedmont Natural Gas Company Inc. and Duke Energy Corp., both headquartered in Charlotte--say the 595-mile-long project will affect hundreds of thousands of customers. Those include Duke's natural-gas-fueled power plants, such as Lee Combined Cycle Plant in Wayne County, residences served by Piedmont and businesses, both current and future.

The ACP is scheduled to be complete in 2018 and is predicted to fuel $11.7 million in economic activity, create 925 jobs and add $6 million in annual local tax revenue, says Dominion spokesman Bruce McKay. That doesn't include the $680 million and nearly 4,500 jobs that its construction and maintenance is expected to bring to North Carolina. That's welcome news to many of the counties in its path, which are some of the state's poorest. Northampton is one of them. The U.S. Census Bureau says its 2014 median household income was about $31,500, compared with about $46,700 state wide. It has been chosen for one of the pipeline's three compression stations, which pressurize the natural gas, moving it through the pipeline. It will employ about a dozen people and generate about $1 million in annual property revenue.

The ACP will stoke the region's economy in other ways. "The pipeline will have a dramatic impact on natural-gas availability in eastern North Carolina," says John Chaffee, president of Greenville-based NCEast Alliance, a nonprofit economic-development agency serving 22 counties in the state's northeastern corner. "The [natural] gas we have currently comes from Charlotte, which means we're at the end of the line and often are handicapped by a lack of pressure. This is especially critical for industrial customers, who are sometimes told to go offline so that more gas will be available for residential customers."

Chaffee and other economic developers say the region has lost company locations and expansions because of the sparse supply of gas. Large, energy-intensive manufacturers, such as metal and food processors, need the fuel to create heat that melts, cooks or dries raw materials.

The pipeline will be the first of several infrastructure projects to be completed in eastern North Carolina. Businesses and residents are setting their sights on them, banking on their ability to attract more opportunities to a region that has shown...