When the letter arrived from a Texas pipeline company asking permission to enter his land, Alan Zipperer refused to allow surveyors onto his property.

But they came anyway, he said, traipsing through his corn fields and pine forests and sticking wooden stakes in the low-country land his family has owned since the 1700s.

“I don’t want a private company to build a gasoline pipeline in my front yard — or anywhere on my property,” he said. “They told me the same thing they told others: ‘We’re a big company, we’re coming, and the state of Georgia can’t stop us.'”

Zipperer, 60, is one of many Southern landowners challenging the nation’s largest energy infrastructure company, Kinder Morgan, as it plans to run a petroleum pipeline through 360 miles of bottom land, river forests and freshwater coastal wetlands across South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

The pipeline’s opponents argue it represents an unconstitutional use of eminent domain and an environmental threat.

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican, entered the fray May 7, announcing that the state would fight the $1-billion project in court. The Georgia Department of Transportation rejected the pipeline plan May 19, declaring it would not serve a public need.

The dispute is one of a growing number of skirmishes over pipelines nationwide. With the U.S. producing more oil and gas than it has in decades, private companies are clamoring to build new transportation infrastructure, said Alexandra Klass, a professor who specializes in energy law at the University of Minnesota.

One of two pipelines being proposed in Georgia, the Palmetto pipeline is particularly contentious because it would cross land owned by the state’s House majority leader, Jon Burns, and a local media tycoon, William S. Morris III, who owns newspapers in Augusta, Savannah and Jacksonville, Fla.

“What’s different about this project — unprecedented — is that a landowner controls three major newspapers along the pipeline route,” said Allen Fore, vice president of public affairs for Kinder Morgan. It was also highly unusual, he added, for a leading oil company, Colonial Oil, to work with local river keepers to oppose a pipeline.

“Certainly, we have seen strange bedfellows line up in opposition,” Fore said.

The Palmetto pipeline would carry up to 167,000 barrels of refined petroleum a day from Belton, S.C., to Jacksonville. It would cross the Savannah River and work its way down the Georgia coast, crossing four more major rivers.

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