Section 368 Energy Corridor Screener — Federal ROW Siting Flag

Batch coordinate screener for the designated Section 368 West-wide Energy Corridors — the federal transmission and pipeline rights-of-way that BLM and USFS pre-approved on public land in the 2008 Designation of Energy Corridors on Federal Land in the 11 Western States Programmatic EIS (under Section 368 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005). Give it a list of sites (lat/lon) and it returns, for each one, whether the site falls inside a designated corridor, the nearest corridor — segment ID, designated use (electric / pipeline / multi-modal), width, managing agency, status — the distance, and a row_streamlining_flag that signals when a route benefits from the pre-completed federal siting analysis.

Routing a transmission line or pipeline inside a Section 368 corridor can mean a faster, narrower federal right-of-way review, because the corridor-level NEPA siting work was already done. Routing outside one means the project needs its own project-specific siting review from scratch. That distinction is a real early-stage cost/schedule input for transmission, pipeline and West-wide energy siting teams — and this actor is the first tool on Apify to turn the raw Argonne/BLM/USFS corridor layer into a per-site verdict instead of a flat map export.

Data is the multi-agency Argonne National Laboratory / BLM / USFS Section 368 Energy Corridor FeatureServer — a static, authoritative snapshot (last updated 2017-12-12) of every corridor designated across the 11 western states.

Who it's for

• Transmission & pipeline developers / ROW applicants — check candidate routes against pre-designated federal corridors before committing to a siting study.
• West-wide energy siting analysts & NEPA consultants — fast batch screen of a route or project portfolio for corridor overlap.
• Federal-land energy developers (wind, solar, BESS interconnection routing) — corridors are a natural collector-line / gen-tie routing option.
• Land, real estate & Phase-I due-diligence teams — flag a parcel that sits inside a federal energy ROW corridor.
• AI agents & data pipelines — a clean, chainable geospatial due-diligence tool via MCP.

Example input

{
  "assets": [
    { "lat": 41.673613, "lon": -107.700677, "label": "S. Wyoming route point A", "radiusMiles": 10 },
    { "lat": 39.7392, "lon": -104.9903, "label": "Denver, CO metro", "radiusMiles": 10 },
    { "lat": 36.1699, "lon": -115.1398, "label": "Las Vegas, NV metro", "radiusMiles": 10 },
    { "lat": 40.014986, "lon": -105.270546, "label": "Boulder, CO foothills", "radiusMiles": 15 },
    { "lat": 41.8781, "lon": -87.6298, "label": "Chicago, IL (outside 11-state West)", "radiusMiles": 10 }
  ],
  "radiusMiles": 10,
  "maxAssets": 500
}

Each asset is { lat, lon, label?, radiusMiles? } (radius in miles, optional per-asset override — corridors are sparse and narrow, so the default is wider than a typical proximity screen). "lat,lon" strings and [lat, lon] arrays are also accepted. One dataset row (one billed result) is produced per asset; a bad entry yields an ERROR row and the run continues.

Output fields

Field	Description
asset_label, asset_lat, asset_lon	The screened site.
radius_miles	Search radius used for this asset.
in_corridor	Authoritative point-in-polygon test: true when the site falls inside a designated corridor.
corridor_count_within_radius	Count of distinct corridor polygons (containing + nearby) within the radius.
nearest_corridor_id / nearest_corridor_name	Source ID and segment identifier (a route code like 78-138, not a place name).
nearest_designated_use / nearest_designated_use_label	Raw code (Electric-only, All, Pipeline, ...) and a plain-English label.
nearest_width_feet	Designated corridor width in feet (already reflected in the polygon boundary — no manual buffer needed).
nearest_managing_agency	BLM or USFS.
nearest_sec368_status / nearest_sec368_designated	Raw status text and a true/false/unknown reading of it.
nearest_distance_miles	Distance to the nearest corridor boundary; 0 when inside one.
row_streamlining_flag	True when the site is inside a formally Designated corridor — a federal-ROW streamlining signal.
row_streamlining_note	Plain-English explanation of the flag for this specific site.
error, disclaimer, checked_at, source_url	Diagnostics + provenance.

Use as an MCP tool

This actor is callable by AI agents (Claude, Cursor, etc.) via mcp.apify.com. The field-level output descriptions make it a clean, chainable energy-siting due-diligence tool: feed it candidate route points and it returns a structured Section 368 corridor verdict per site — pairs naturally with grid-proximity, sage-grouse habitat, and other federal-land siting screeners in the same portfolio.

FAQ

Is this a permit guarantee? No. row_streamlining_flag is an editorial siting signal based on the source's Sec368Stat field. Project-specific NEPA and agency ROW approval are still required — confirm current corridor status with BLM/USFS before relying on it.

How is distance measured? Point-to-polygon-boundary distance (nearest edge of the corridor polygon) in miles; 0 when the site is inside the corridor.

Why is "corridor name" just a number like 78-138? The Argonne dataset labels corridors by their PEIS route-segment ID, not a descriptive place name — that's the authoritative identifier used in the Records of Decision.

Which areas are covered? Only the 11 western states from the 2008 PEIS (AZ, CA, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, OR, UT, WA, WY). A site elsewhere (e.g. most of the eastern US) returns a valid in_corridor: false CLEAR row — that's expected, not missing data.

What if a site has no corridor nearby? You still get a billed row with in_corridor: false, row_streamlining_flag: false, and null corridor fields — a clean "no corridor" record.

Pricing

Pay-per-result: one billed row per screened asset. Empty/no-corridor sites still return a row.

Source: Argonne National Laboratory / BLM / USFS Section 368 Energy Corridor FeatureServer (2008 PEIS + Records of Decision, updated 2017-12-12). Public federal data. This tool is informational and not a substitute for an agency ROW determination.