The Supreme Court could intervene in a dispute over the long-stalled Mountain Valley Pipeline backed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) before returning to their chambers from summer recess.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit issued a stay Monday without explanation that paused construction on a portion of the MVP intended to transport fuel from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia. The stay prompted frustrations among pipeline developers Equitrans Midstream and Manchin himself, who tweeted that the ruling was "unlawful."

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Equitrans released a statement Tuesday saying it's "evaluating all legal options" and considering an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, noting that the ruling jeopardizes its plan to complete the pipeline by the end of the year.

The 4th Circuit "defies the will and clear intent of a bipartisan Congress ... to expedite completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline project, which was deemed to be in the national interest," the company wrote in its statement.

Rob Rains, a senior energy analyst at Washington Analysis, told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday that Equitrans and other companies involved in the project "likely have a keen interest in this case getting reviewed by the 'shadow docket,'" which generally refers to the justices deciding a case without full briefing or oral argument and without any written opinion.

"Because if they wait for the court to take it up on the merits, recent history suggests they're in a really tough spot," Rains said, noting that previous pipeline projects that succeeded on appeal, such as the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the PennEast Pipeline, were ultimately shafted due to unresolved disputes over permitting requirements that were tied up in litigation.

During May's debt ceiling negotiations, Manchin successfully added a measure intended to accelerate the multibillion-dollar natural gas pipeline that's been repeatedly stalled due to environmental groups raising concerns. That measure ordered all necessary permits to be issued and for the 4th Circuit to be removed from jurisdiction over the matter, a move that neighboring Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) said raised "serious questions about its legality" on Wednesday.

"I am neither a proponent nor an opponent of the MVP because I believe there should be an administrative process," Kaine said, adding, "I objected to the provision in the debt ceiling deal that exempted the Mountain Valley Pipeline uniquely among any other infrastructure project in the country, that exempted it from normal permitting processes and also stripped jurisdiction away from the 4th Circuit."

The stay issued Monday surrounds a 3-mile section through the Jefferson National Forest. Conservationists say the construction plan may cause erosion that will ruin soil and water quality. On Tuesday, the 4th Circuit also issued a similar stay stemming from parallel litigation alleging the pipeline would violate the Endangered Species Act.

Wild Virginia, an environmental group that opposes the MVP construction, argued that the provision of the debt ceiling deal that attempts to strip jurisdiction from the 4th Circuit "violates the separation-of-powers doctrine and we believe the stay was necessary to prevent irreparable harm while the legal issues are being decided," citing their brief in response to a Department of Interior motion to dismiss the case.

The 4th Circuit has blocked construction of the pipeline on multiple occasions over the years, but Equitrans maintains that the most recent stay is a clear defiance of Congress's own intent to automatically designate the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit as the default appeals court to handle the lawsuit.

Additionally, the 4th Circuit has yet to weigh in on the Interior Department's motion to dismiss request, which Rains believes "everybody should expect the court to deny."

The Supreme Court's so-called shadow docket is typically reserved for emergency petitions filed to the justices requesting to stay lower court rulings on procedural grounds, not merits, which usually does not provide much information for the justices' reasoning behind the matters at hand.

"The short answer is that construction of MVP is halted unless/until SCOTUS, which is currently on summer recess, issues a stay on the Fourth Circuit Court order," Rains wrote in a July 11 analysis, adding that a time frame for such a step isn't certain.

Rains also contends that while the case is major for Equitrans, it might be too dissimilar from the types of cases that the Supreme Court decides on an emergency basis such as issues around voter rights, abortion, or immigration. But because the price of not performing construction is estimated to cost $20 million per month, an emergency appeal "might fit the bill" of the justices, Rains wrote.

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ClearView Energy Partners, an interdependent research firm watching the MVP cases, issued an analysis saying that the "best case scenario" for the pipeline would be for the 4th Circuit to dismiss the cases "as sought in the motions from the [Justice Department] and MVP in the near term."

"If it does not, we think that the agencies and the project would pursue and would have good chances of securing a reversal on appeal at the Supreme Court; however, that scenario would result in a longer delay of the construction restart," according to the ClearView analysis.