This is the first article in a series that Inside Climate News is running about a wave of planned natural gas projects in North Carolina. It was written by both of us.
Andrea Childers walked slowly down a mossy path, with the family Corgi, Hubert, showing them the way. The creek is a mile downstream from the site of the Moriah Energy Center in southeastern Person County. She got there by going off of an old logging road.
Because of this creek, the Childers family bought the land more than 30 years ago. The Childers sent their children, who are now 29 and 26, there to play and catch crayfish close to their country home. It was where she felt better after she lost the baby.
Childers showed pictures on her phone from January of a stream that are so clear they look like glass. The water is brown now.
An ex-social studies teacher named Childers, her husband Paul, and the Neuse Riverkeeper, Samantha Krop, took three people from the state’s Division of Water Resources’ inspection team on a walking tour of the nearby creeks in the middle of August. Krop found that people leaving the Moriah Energy Center had 20 times the state limits for turbidity.
Krop said, “After a lot of back and forth, the state finally admitted that the sediment was coming from Dominion’s site.” Dominion is the owner of the energy center. “But they said they couldn’t do anything.” Here, you can see how we keep going around and around.
Childers said, “There is no doubt that this is Dominion’s pollution.” “Once again, this is a useful lesson.”
Dominion Energy was cutting down trees and blasting through rock a half mile away to build the $400 million Moriah Energy Center. The center will keep liquified natural gas on 485 acres of forestland.
The MEC, as it is called in the area, would hold 50 million gallons of LNG in two pressurized tanks that would be 260 degrees below zero when it was done. Each tank would be 160 feet tall and 600 feet across, which is about the size of a spinning wheel.
A few days later, Krop sits in the passenger seat of a Cessna being flown over southern Person County by a retired lieutenant colonel who volunteers as a pilot for the conservation group SouthWings.
It’s the middle of summer, and thick woods look like a green brocade over the land. The curvy and narrow Helena Moriah Road shapes the fields, where the rows of corn that are almost ready to be picked are ribbed like denim.
All of a sudden, there it is: the plant that will be built to freeze and liquefy natural gas. It is now a brown mess of broken glass and dirt.
If you go up another 5,000 feet, you can see the rest of the fossil fuel industry’s huge footprint. For example, Duke Energy wants to build two new natural gas-fired power plants next to Hyco Lake in northern Person County to replace the coal-fired ones that are already there.
The T15 Reliability Project, Dominion’s planned natural gas pipeline, would then go from the new Duke plants 45 miles west to Eden in Rockingham County.
More natural gas would flow through the Southgate part of the Mountain Valley Pipeline close to Eden. To finish, an addition to a Transco pipeline would go through 28 miles of land in the southwest, going through Rockingham, Guilford, Forsyth, and Davidson counties.
With Duke’s two planned natural gas plants in Catawba County and the four compressor stations that go with them, North Carolina would release hundreds of thousands of tons of new greenhouse gases into the air every year.
The natural gas that moves into North Carolina comes from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio’s shale formations, where fracking takes place. At every step of the gas production process—from drilling deep into the ground to the wellhead, compressor station, liquified natural gas processing plant, transmission line, and finally to kitchen stoves—methane gas escapes into the air. This gas warms the atmosphere 80 times more than carbon dioxide.
As the Earth warms and the U.S. makes a shaky move toward green energy, the build-out of fossil fuels in North Carolina is similar to efforts in other parts of the country. A study by the Sierra Club of federal and state data puts North Carolina in fourth place in the country for the number of natural gas plants that are expected to open over the next 11 years. Texas and Indiana are also having big build-outs.
People who live nearby, environmental groups, and people who support clean energy all want to stop these projects.
They are worried about more than just the effects on water, air, and habitats in their own area. They are also worried about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change on a world scale.
After having a glass of cold lemonade, Childers said, “I hear about climate change all the time.” “Please don’t let us say why it’s happening.”
Childers has big brown eyes that can look kind at first but then get angry very quickly. Her short blonde hair frames them. That’s how she looks when she faces the county officials who agreed unanimously to change the land’s use so that the Moriah Energy Center can be built there.