Plans for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a natural gas pipeline that would have stretched some 600 miles from West Virginia through Virginia to eastern North Carolina, have been canceled, Dominion Energy and Duke Energy announced on Sunday.

The companies said that the cancelation was due to ongoing delays and increasing cost uncertainty which had threatened the economic viability of the project.

A series of legal challenges to the project’s federal and state permits has caused significant project cost increases and timing delays, a release stated.

As a result, recent public guidance of project cost has increased to $8 billion from the original estimate of $4.5 billion to $5 billion. In addition, the most recent public estimate of commercial in-service in early 2022 represents a nearly three-and-a-half-year delay with uncertainty remaining.

According to the two companies, the project was initially announced in 2014 in response to a lack of energy supply and delivery diversifi...