Compressor station protestors were removed by the police

By Denise Lavoie, Roanoke Times (Associated Press), January 9, 2019

RICHMOND — A state board approved a contentious plan Tuesday to build a natural gas pipeline station in a historic African-American community, prompting angry shouts of “shame” from more than 200 opponents.

The Virginia State Air Pollution Control Board voted 4-0 in favor of a key permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would run 600 miles and carry fracked natural gas from West Virginia into Virginia and North Carolina.

Some opponents of the project hissed, coughed and shouted during the meeting. Fifteen people were removed by state police, and one woman was charged with trespassing after she laid down on the floor and refused to comply with police verbal commands to leave.

The proposed site for the compressor station is in Union Hill, an unincorporated community founded by freed slaves. The community is in rural Buckingham County, about an hour’s drive west of Richmond.

Opponents are concerned that exhaust from the 54,000-horsepower compressor station would hurt low-income and elderly residents living nearby. Supporters say it will boost development.

The station would be built on 15 acres of a 70-acre site with the rest of the property left undisturbed, according to Dominion Energy, the pipeline’s lead developer. Compressor stations are used to power interstate natural gas pipelines, moving gas through the system.

Paul Wilson, pastor of two Baptist churches near the proposed site, said opponents will keep fighting. He didn’t elaborate on whether they would take legal action. “We’re looking at all of our avenues,” he said after the vote. “It’s a long way from over. I think Dominion wants to wear people down. But that’s not going to happen.”

Dominion spokesman Karl Neddenien acknowledged in a statement after the vote that it will “have to continue building trust in the community.” He said the project’s backers are making investments in a new community center and rescue squad “but it will not end there.”

Neddenien said most air emissions at the station will be 50 to 80 percent lower than at any other compressor station in Virginia. The air pollution permit has become a flashpoint in the yearslong fight over the pipeline.

Supporters say it’s needed to help boost the supply of natural gas. Opponents say it is an unnecessary fossil fuel infrastructure project that tramples on land rights and hurts the environment.

With a current pricetag of $6.5 billion to $7 billion, the pipeline has recently suffered significant legal setbacks, including a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last month throwing out a permit for the pipeline to cross two national forests, including parts of the Appalachian Trail. Dominion has suspended all project construction and said it plans to appeal the ruling.

John Laury, who lives less than a mile from where the compressor station would be built, said he doesn’t believe assurances from Dominion or state regulators that emissions from the station would not hurt residents’ health or the environment. “I challenge them to come live in the community with us, to breathe this air, drink this water,” said Laury, 74.

Mike Dowd, the state Department of Environmental Quality’s Air Director, said the department reviewed compressor station permits from around the country and scrutinized pollution control technology. He said the station will “set a new national standard that all future compressor stations will have to meet across the country.”

Gov. Ralph Northam angered environmentalists and minority groups when he replaced two members of the pollution control board after it delayed a scheduled vote in November. Northam, a Democrat, said the move was unrelated to the compressor station vote and that members were replaced because their terms had expired. Two new members didn’t vote Tuesday, nor did a third member who cited a conflict of interest.

Board member William Ferguson said at the hearing that there’s a real need for the pipeline, particularly in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region. “The region needs the energy; the state needs the energy,” he said. His comments prompted a woman to shout: “How much is Dominion paying you?”

Some opponents held pieces of paper with a blown-up photo of the governor’s face and the words “foul” or “shut it down.” Northam has said he’s agnostic on how the board votes. “As far as the pipeline … there’s not a lot of middle road on that issue,” Northam said in a recent radio interview. “I’ve tried to be as fair as I can.”

After the board approved the permit, some of the opponents overturned their chairs. Charles Strickler, a retired dentist, predicted that opponents will not give up their fight. “I think there are going to be people in front of bulldozers for the pipeline, getting arrested,” he said.

Residents off PA Route 88 & Cardox Road

A Pennsylvania gas company offers residents cash to buy protection from any claims of harm

From an Article by Naveena Sadasivam, ProPublica, July 2, 2014

For the last eight years, Pennsylvania has been riding the natural gas boom, with companies drilling and fracking thousands of wells across the state. And in a little corner of Washington County, some 20 miles outside of Pittsburgh, EQT Corporation has been busy – drilling close to a dozen new wells on one site.

It didn’t take long for the residents (off PA Route 88 north) of Finleyville who lived near the fracking operations to complain – about the noise and air quality, and what they regarded as threats to their health and quality of life. Initially, EQT, one of the largest producers of natural gas in Pennsylvania, tried to allay concerns with promises of noise studies and offers of vouchers so residents could stay in hotels to avoid the noise and fumes.

But then, in what experts say was a rare tactic, the company got more aggressive: it offered all of the households along Cardox Road $50,000 in cash if they would agree to release the company from any legal liability, for current operations as well as those to be carried out in the future. It covered potential health problems and property damage, and gave the company blanket protection from any kind of claim over noise, dust, light, smoke, odors, fumes, soot, air pollution or vibrations.

The agreement also defined the company’s operations as not only including drilling activity but the construction of pipelines, power lines, roads, tanks, ponds, pits, compressor stations, houses and buildings.

“The release is so incredibly broad and such a laundry list,” said Doug Clark, a gas lease attorney in Pennsylvania who mainly represents landowners. “You’re releasing for everything including activity that hasn’t even occurred yet. It’s crazy.”

Linda Robertson, a spokeswoman for EQT, said in a statement that the company had worked hard and conscientiously to address the concerns of the residents. She said consultants had been hired, data collected on noise and health matters, and that independent analysis had shown the company was in compliance with noise and air quality requirements. She would not comment in detail on the financial offers.

“When landowner and leaseholder concerns arise, it is a standard practice for EQT personnel to work diligently to listen to and understand their concerns, particularly those related to the temporary inconveniences of living near a production site,” Robertson said. “Regarding the neighbors on Cardox Road, the majority of whom are leaseholders, we have been in regular and ongoing communications with residents and local officials to address and resolve questions as they arise.”

The liability agreements EQT has used in Finleyville — they are often known as nuisance easements — have been used in other circumstances. Residents living close to airports, for instance, are often offered such easements as compensation for having to bear with the noise, vibrations and fumes from air traffic. Property owners close to landfills and wind farms may also sign similar agreements.

But experts say such easements are rare in the oil and gas industry. “This is only the second time I’ve seen one,” said Clark, the Pennsylvania attorney. “They’re absolutely not common at all.”

Clark says it is unlikely that companies will start handing out such agreements en masse, saying doing so could decrease landowners’ confidence about the safety of the company’s operations and their personal health. “People are going to say the gas companies must be concerned about air pollution because they’re offering these easements,” said Clark. “Everybody’s going to get suspicious.”

Earlier this year, a couple in Texas was awarded $3 million in a lawsuit against a gas drilling company. The couple alleged that the company’s operations had affected their health, decreased their property value and forced them to move away. The case was one of the first successful lawsuits alleging that air pollution from gas drilling activity caused health issues.

Experts say that verdict and others like it have emboldened landowners to take their claims to court. Nuisance easements may be one way to ensure that the company can easily block landowners from claiming damages.

Apart from drilling and fracking wells, EQT also builds and operates the infrastructure — pipelines and compressor stations — necessary to move natural gas to market. Its operations are headquartered in Pennsylvania but it also owns wells in Kentucky and West Virginia.

In 2008, landowners in Finleyville signed a gas lease for drilling with Chesapeake Energy. The company only drilled one well, but last year it sold its leases to EQT, which has since drilled 11 additional wells. So far the company’s strategy to reduce its liabilities has worked with some landowners.

Muriel Spencer, whose house is about 500 feet from the drilling, took the money. She said she did not consult with a lawyer, but had asked the company to put a five-year time frame around the release. The initial contract released the company from liabilities indefinitely. “I cannot complain about the drilling to this point,” Spencer said, adding that EQT “has been nothing but fair with me.”

The company’s spokeswoman would not comment on how many landowners EQT approached with the proposed agreements, but said that “approximately 85% of the residents” had signed them.

An initial version of the proposed standard agreement listed 30 Finleyville residents and required that they all sign the agreements in order to receive the $50,000. When the residents refused, EQT modified the agreement such that the compensation was not contingent on all landowners signing it.

ProPublica found that at least four of the 30 residents have agreed to some version of the initial agreement that EQT proposed and have received $50,000 in exchange. It is unclear what changes were made to the agreement during negotiations.

Robertson, the company spokeswoman, said in her statement that “any changes made to the agreements during negotiations were based on requests directly from the resident, and/or their attorney.”

But some of the residents have refused to negotiate with the company. ”I was insulted,” said Gary Baumgardner, who was approached by EQT with the offer in January. “We’re being pushed out of our home and they want to insult us with this offer.”

Baumgardner says his house is like an amphitheater, constantly vibrating from the drilling. At times the noise gets up to 75 decibels, equivalent to a running vacuum cleaner, he said. Earlier this year, EQT Corp. put up a sound barrier to limit the noise, but Baumgardner says it has made little difference to his quality of life. ”We took the pictures down in the bedroom because they still vibrate at night,” he said.

Baumgardner says he has had to leave his house at least three times so far because the gas fumes from the well site were too much to bear. A local health group has installed air quality monitors in his home and several of his neighbors. Last year when the one of the monitors began flashing red, his daughter, pregnant at the time, fled the house. She has since moved away after her doctor advised her not to live close to a drilling site.

“Our house is most often not livable,” said Baumgardner. EQT’s response to his complaints, he said, has been “constant dismissals, excuses, delays and broken promises.”

Robertson would not respond to Baumgardner’s specific assertions. She did point to several mitigation efforts she said the company had taken, including the sound wall, but also involving switching to quieter machinery and applying for permits to transport water via pipes instead of trucks.

Baumgardner believes the nuisance easement he was offered is a part of the industry’s tactic to silence landowners.

“Throughout the last several months, an EQT regional land manager, one of our community advisers, and our community relations manager have all been engaged in phone calls and personal meetings with residents, attended township meetings, and visited the production site on multiple occasions to identify and confirm the reported issues, if any,” Robertson’s statement said.

“The easements are part of our overall consistent and ongoing effort to address leaseholder concerns.”

Save WV Streams

The recent column in the New York Times by Tom Friedman entitled “Get It Right on Gas” is of particular interest to me. I have spent a lifetime farming in West Virginia in the Marcellus area and enjoy the benefit of a good education, BS in Chemistry and Math, MS in Education and a Ph. D. in Inorganic Chemistry.

Your article shows the bias to be expected of an intelligent, media informed person, one who is kind, not tough minded. It also shows you have not visited the areas where shale drilling takes place to talk with people, nor examined the vast literature of complaint about the harm done in the field.

In the Marcellus area we are no strangers to extractive industry, we have had deep and strip coal, timber, and the longest history of oil extraction – anywhere. The rip and tear methods of resource extraction have a new parallel in the Marcellus. They will not make our states prosperous, but when played out will have injured thousands of people, depreciated property values and damaged our long time industries, timber, cattle, recreation and retirement. Lots of people come here for the quiet life.

You speak of “mom and pop” drillers. These are, in fact, ephemeral creations by larger entities which pop into existence and out of existence, like some subatomic particles do. The objective is to avoid liability. Government at the state level is most easily bent to the driller’s needs. The federal government can do real research, so must be kept out as much as possible. Local government is too close to what people want and has to be defeated. State government can be bought.

Economic evaluations don’t include the cost. It is externalized by accounting like a balance sheet with credits and no debits. It is inscribed in law for oil and gas by long practice, from a time when space was considered infinite with respect to the need for natural resources. Damage is externalized. That has been the practice for resource extraction in the past, and it continues.

The notion of a “transition fuel,” which you mention, serves the industry and the investors, not citizens. The problem is NOW. We need to act NOW on global warming.

You can not expect strangers to observe regulations, laws or “best practices,” (if they are worth anything at all) in the face of the stress of being so over-built as the shale drilling industry.

When it started the drive was to lease as much of the finite resource as possible. Then the drive was to get as favorable legislation as possible. And they got that. This appeared in the NYT recently:

“Mr. Headley said the drilling foreman on his property told him he had drilled all over the world but never in a place easier than Pennsylvania: “Ask for what you want and you’ll get it,” he quoted the driller.”

Now the drive is to export the gas, even though originally the argument was “to give the United States energy independence.” Are we not going to need that independence in the future?

The attack on alternative energy sources in Pennsylvania, by the shale drillers Governor Corbett, and elsewhere, is certainly not without the shale driller’s assent.

These are not kind people, their objective is not to help America. Their objective is to help themselves, and the arguments for shale drilling, the laws for it, the effort, the PR, the risk is not for America. When it is over the debris will be left behind, including the unplugged wells, which are never mentioned, and the drillers and investors will move on. But the brownfields won’t. Nor will the population move.

It has happened before.            

Written by: S. Tom Bond, Jane Lew, Lewis County, WV