The 42 inch MVP is excessive in diameter and length

From an Article by Mike Tony, Charleston Gazette Mail, Jun 1, 2021

The Mountain Valley Pipeline faces a consequential summer. So do the streams and wetlands that the pipeline’s developers are seeking permission to cross.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will decide by July 2 whether to grant or deny additional time to West Virginia and Virginia environmental regulators to consider water permit requests from the joint venture that owns the pipeline, according to Corps Huntington District spokesman Brian Maka.

Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC, the joint venture that owns the pipeline, still has applications pending with West Virginia and Virginia state environmental regulators for about 300 water crossings while it seeks approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to tunnel under 120 additional waterbodies.

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection asked last month for an additional 90 days beyond the 120 days the Corps of Engineers gave the agency to review Mountain Valley Pipeline’s water permit request. In March, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality requested an additional year to review the pipeline permit application. Both departments previously said that they hadn’t heard back from the Corps.

The pipeline already has had adverse impacts on West Virginia’s waters. State environmental regulators proposed a consent order earlier this year requiring Mountain Valley to pay a $303,000 fine for violating permits by failing to control erosion and sediment-laden water.

“Based on what I’ve seen thus far, I don’t know how they can permit this activity knowing that there are going to be additional impacts to water resources because of MVP’s track record,” West Virginia Rivers Coalition staff scientist Autumn Crowe said.

Asked about the Rivers Coalition’s arguments, Natalie Cox, spokeswoman for Equitrans Midstream, the Canonsburg, Pennsylvania-based lead developer of the project, argued that the claims placed specific policy agendas above that of environmental protection. “Mountain Valley welcomes the opportunity to work with all stakeholders to address environmental protection concerns and ensure that best practices are implemented,” Cox said. Cox noted that Mountain Valley is seeking individual water permits after legal challenges from environmental groups prompted it to abandon a blanket water permit issued by the Corps.

The Rivers Coalition and other project opponents have said the pipeline’s greenhouse gas emissions make it a bad idea, especially given the International Energy Agency’s call last month for no new investments in fossil fuels.

The West Virginia DEP will hold a virtual public hearing June 22 on whether it should approve a water permit for the project. The pipeline has sought and received water permit approval from West Virginia before. “The WVDEP will consider whether the components of the activity, resulting in a discharge to waters and contemplated by the federal [Corps] permit and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission license, will comply with the state’s water quality requirements and what conditions may be necessary to ensure that compliance,” acting department spokesman Terry Fletcher said in an email.

This article has been edited for length. See full story HERE

More Solar Panels in WV: www.MTVSolar.com

The Coal State of WV in Transition to Solar Energy

Evell Meade of Kermit, WV, Greg Dotson of Parkersburg, WV and Mark Hunt of Charleston, WV, from left to right, carry a solar panel into a doctor’s office in Williamson, WV.  A group devoted to creating alternative energy jobs in Central Appalachia is building a first for West Virginia’s southern coalfields region this week: a rooftop solar array, assembled by unemployed and underemployed coal miners and contractors.

West Virginia may be best known as the source of the coal that built America and keeps its lights on, yet communities throughout the state are taking back their energy independence and going solar.

At just 9.70 cents per kilowatt hour, West Virginians pay the third-lowest electricity rates in the nation. Yet they don’t enjoy the nation’s lowest electricity bills, and they’re not likely to in the future, either.

Indeed, from 2007 to 2011, electricity rates jumped an average of 50 percent across the state. And on Feb. 3, the state’s Public Service Commission approved another rate increase for Mon Power and Potomac Edison, subsidiaries operating under the Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp. Together, these subsidiaries serve over 520,500 customers in 34 counties and the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia.

This latest hike is “just 7.4 percent more reason to go solar,” according to Joey James’ reading of the document from the commission.

James is a staff scientist with the Energy Program of Downstream Strategies, a Morgantown, West Virginia-based environmental consulting firm. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, James decided to stay in the Mountain State after graduating from West Virginia University. Considering the state’s history as a coal producer and its more recent rise as a natural gas hub, it would be easy to assume that James decided to build a career around tapping into those energy resources — but he’s not.

“There’s a community of young West Virginians who all have the same vision: What’s happened historically isn’t working. And we’re all looking ahead to something new,” James told MintPress News.

That “something new” is slowly, but surely, coming in the form of solar power. Over the past couple of years, community solar co-ops have been popping up on the hills and in the hollers of West Virginia, and more are in the works.

Despite a lack of state incentives and the high up-front costs, communities and individuals are pulling together to take back their energy independence and free themselves from the monopolies held by energy companies which largely rely on coal to generate electricity.

“West Virginia’s coal built America”

West Virginia’s identity and economy has long been tied to the coal-based energy it produces not just for itself — the state generated at least 96 percent of its own electricity from coal last year — but also the nation.

“West Virginia’s coal built America. It fired its steel mills, lit its homes, and provided the cheap energy to create the wealthiest nation in the world,” Patrick Reis wrote for the National Journal in 2013.

Yet, as that article goes on to note, this hasn’t improved the lives of West Virginians. The state consistently ranks among the nation’s poorest, its residents scoring the lowest in well-being indices and with nearly the lowest life expectancy.

Central Appalachian coal production dropped 20 percent from 1997 to 2008 alone, and the state lost 17,000 mining jobs from 1983 to 2012 (though an EPA crackdown on mountaintop removal in 2009 provided a boost to coal employment).

When hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, took off in the state, it seemed like an obvious new economic lifeline. But as Measure of America, a project under the Social Science Research Council, reported in its American Human Development Report, Measure of America 2013-2014, part of a series measuring well-being in health, education and earnings, “Resources like natural gas enabled states such as New Mexico, Montana, and West Virginia to avoid the earnings losses most other states faced between 2000 and 2010. But their HD [Human Development] Index rankings remained low; valuable natural resources do not automatically fuel improvements in people’s well-being.”

While noting that those working in the extractives industry earn an average of $22 per hour — compared to $16 across all industries and the state’s $7.25 an hour minimum wage — and that these earnings trickle back into local businesses as workers, especially those without college degrees, flock toward employment opportunities, Measure of America reports:

“But the higher pay that workers earn is offset by dangerous working conditions, lack of job security (market changes can have big and sudden impacts), and relatively short careers (these jobs are often physically arduous and thus best suited to the young) without much room for advancement. Fracking boom towns have seen skyrocketing rents; poor, overcrowded living conditions and housing shortages; traffic, sanitation, and other environmental impacts; increased violence among workers and against women; and problems with substance abuse.”

At best, the natural gas industry is a mixed bag. And like the coal industry, it isn’t necessarily bankable in a long-term sense. Coal and natural gas aren’t hidden below the surface in unlimited amounts, and aside from environmental and socio-cultural concerns surrounding their extraction and use, they’re inherently non-renewable resources that are going to run out eventually.

Solar is a different story entirely. The solar industry is creating jobs 20 times faster than the overall economy. There are more solar installation sector jobs than coal mining jobs and it created 50 percent more jobs than the oil and gas pipeline construction industries combined. West Virginia, in particular, has favorable solar resources which, according to a 2013 policy white paper from Downstream Strategies and the Mountain Institute, surpass that of Germany, “the largest and most successful solar market in the world.”

“West Virginia needed this more”

After graduating from college in 2007, Dan Conant left West Virginia so he could work in the “solar energy industry, renewable energy, energy efficiency — anything I really wanted to do.” He spent the next few years launching a series of solar projects everywhere from Virginia to Vermont.

“I kept feeling a sense of guilt, and felt like West Virginia needed this more, not just because of energy, but because of brain drain,” Conant told MintPress.

Since 1980, West Virginia has lost a quarter-million residents born in the state. This is particularly true among the young, college-educated set, who have generally sought more gainful employment in other states. Further, the state appears consistently at the bottom of Forbes magazine’s Best States for Business and Careers list — last year, West Virginia was 48th.

Still, Conant saw a glimmer of hope for solar in West Virginia, and in 2013 he returned to found Solar Holler, which uses a crowd-sourcing and financing program to help community groups and nonprofits go solar.

The organization has teamed up with Maryland-based Mosaic Power to install remote controls on volunteers’ water heaters. These remote controls turn the water heaters on and off for 30 seconds to 15 minutes, acting as “virtual power plants” to allow more solar and wind energy into the grid. The fleets of remote controls on the water heaters fill in the gaps for days when it’s cloudy or winds are calm, and the energy savings are sold to the regional utility grid.

Volunteers are paid $100 per tank, per year. Instead of pocketing these funds, they pass them onto Solar Holler, which puts the money toward solar panel installations for nonprofits like churches and libraries.

Solar Holler completed its first crowdsourcing campaign and installed panels on the Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church in August, and its second campaign is underway to equip the Bolivar-Harpers Ferry Public Library in the historic town of Harpers Ferry with solar panels.

“We’re keeping West Virginia an energy state — it’s always been an energy state,” Conant said. Noting that renewables are the future, he added, “Solar is the next step in that.”

“Let’s do this”

While West Virginia ranks toward the bottom in overall solar jobs, the emergence of solar co-ops throughout the Mountain State is a sign that the state could be poised to climb those rankings — slowly, but steadily.

Mary Ellen Cassidy is helping to lead the exploratory stages for a solar co-op in Wheeling in partnership with WV SUN. Already, there’s a group of 15 to 20 people she describes as interested, though many are “very cautious.”

About 15 years ago, she and her husband looked into installing solar panels at both their home and office — a building that served as West Virginia’s first capitol building when it broke away from Virginia and declared its statehood in 1863. Seeing that solar was too expensive then, Cassidy and her husband opted for an energy efficiency upgrade instead, taking advantage of incentives from agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture to make it affordable.

Today, prices of solar panels and other related costs have dropped considerably, and going solar as a community, through a co-op, further reduces costs.

Cassidy hopes legislators will come to see solar as an investment that needs to be made and approach it with the same enthusiasm that’s been extended to the coal and natural gas industries. In the end, it’s sustainable economic activity that creates local jobs while also chipping away at people’s dependence on polluting, non-renewable energy sources — all things that West Virginia could certainly use more of.

Wheeling itself is currently going through a major revitalization. More and more young people and families are setting down stakes there, opening businesses and restaurants and breathing new life into the Rust Belt city along the Ohio River in the process.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Pipeline services by Access Midstream of the Industrial Park at Jane Lew

Perspectives on Fracking in Central West Virginia

Commentary by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

By luck of the draw, I happen to be in a good spot to observe activity in the Southern Marcellus area. The farm I have lived on for over 50 years is about two miles from the Lewis County Industrial Park, one of the largest concentrations of drilling industry in the Marcellus. The Park has numerous companies with familiar names and smaller outfits are situated in and around it. Being on I-79, these have access to work as far north as Washington, Pennsylvania and all the way to the edge of the region south. The main truck stop between Fairmont and Flatwoods is at the intersection of Jesse Run, the road by my farm and I-79. It does a huge amount of business with fracking industry trucks.

All of us living now are fortunate that we have the Internet to communicate. The democratization of information which we have contrasts with former times when communication depended on newspapers, letters and personal contact. (Incidentally, democratization of information, that is, having information readily available to all, is being threatened by attempts to change the present rules by certain corporate interests.)

Now, to what I observe. Last summer, when Consol Energy bought the right to drill in Dominion’s Lost Creek Storage Field, it looked as though activity would pick up soon. Thumper Trucks went up and down the roads, finding the depth and slant of the Marcellus and there were specific locations of “the first three wells to be drilled in this area (right around Jane Lew)” in the wind. The spacings given were rational from what I knew about drilling patterns, and rights of way were specified for more locations. It looked as if the onslaught was coming.

Oil prices began to drop and voices in the wind just tapered off through the fall. I subscribe to SkyTruth Alerts, which reports new drilling permits. About the time oil hit $80 they began to drop off.

You have to understand the huge capital expenditure involved in drilling. Acquisition of land, acquisition of data (such as the information gained by thumper trucks) and location of the wells are expensive as well as the cost of the drilling rig itself, and the pipes, water and chemicals are very costly. For the drilling companies this money must be borrowed or obtained from stock sales, which in turn cost dividends instead of interest. Time is hugely important because of the cost of use of money.

Remember the old adage “fools rush in where angels fear to tread?” Shale drilling is very much an enterprise where you might come out looking brilliant (if you win), but very much the other if you lose. By this time ($46 a barrel) new permits have trickled to very few.

SkyTruth posts the coordinates of new wells permitted. This allows you to go to Google Earth and look where they would be drilled. You can fly around over the area and find well pads and pipelines in existence when the satellite pictures on which Google Earth is based were taken, a few months previously.

The permits coming out now are almost entirely on existing well pads. This means that the expense of acquisition and land preparation has been completed so the only cost is drilling the well itself. Even most of the cost of connecting the completed well is avoided, because no new long pipelines must be constructed.

The truck stop is still busy. Water trucks are rare – one assumes they are hauling away flowback water, which continues as long as the well produces. Sand trucks are still to be seen. I saw 18 in the truck stop one day around Christmas, but they seem to be thinning down two weeks later. Hauling in the sand is evidence of the actual fracking itself. Water is stockpiled, but sand must come in “just in time” as they say.

The big effort by the drilling industry now is to get the large diameter long distance pipelines built. This is an act of faith. If the price of oil stays down they are in trouble. The oversupply of gas and consequent low U. S. price of natural gas is something the frackers have done to themselves by their over-exuberance.

The excess gas supply has caused many electrical generating companies to substitute gas for coal. A few new power stations are under construction. But, existing power plants can use natural gas. They were designed to use coal by grinding it to a fine powder, which is blown into the combustion furnace. This can be turned up and down like it was gas. These plants are also equipped with gas entry into the combustion space, originally intended for temporary overload capacity (and heatup on start up). What the electricity producers have done is turn down the coal and turn up the gas. That can be done quickly.

If it can reasonably be expected, the cost of gas will stay down and new plants will be built using technology that takes gas as the primary fuel. If they use a combined cycle design it is actually more efficient (gets more electricity from the same gas) than the old coal burners, so coal is OUT FOREVER. The claims for gas to cause less global warming than coal when heat alone is used, are demonstrated false by Anthony Ingraffia, but the myth is very strong, and coal does put out contaminates in addition to carbon dioxide.

It appears the frackers are desperate to install the large diameter long distance pipelines and lock in a need for their gas. The natives are in an uproar, however. Nobody with a view reaching to the end of the pipe’s service life wants it on their property because the incendiary effects of an explosion of a 42 inch high pressure gas line are like having 2000 pound “blockbusters” dropped. And nobody wants the environmental effects of putting it in and maintaining it. I have heard that in the High Appalachian mountains it must be left exposed to the elements, rather than buried, because of the very hard rock and (relatively, don’t laugh Westerners) high altitude.

Once these pipelines are in, the electric utilities will be encouraged to build new electric generating plants dedicated to the use of gas, and the only place it can come from in volume is the Marcellus shale. Never mind the fact that when the drillers get out of the hot spots the gas will become more and more expensive, and the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) will drop well below 10, where it is now.

EROEI was over 50 in the past, and EROEI of 1 means you are putting in as much useful energy as you are taking out. The practical limit is somewhere above 5.

In effect, if the pipelines are built, all those people south of us are going to be paying for gas when they buy electricity no matter how high it gets. The only way out then is to substitute some non-conventional source, such as solar or fusion.

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See also:  www.Appalmad.org and www.WVMatters.org