Ella Rose had returned home from church on Sunday, ready to settle in the afternoon, when her phone rang. It was a friend, Chad Oba, delivering unexpected news: the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, the proposed multi-million dollar project that had consumed their lives for the past six years, no longer existed.
It was officially canceled.
“My reaction was ‘hallelujah,'” Rose, 76, recalled Monday. “I was so elated that I started praising God.”
After protracted legal conflicts and a wave of delays, the two energy companies associated with the project, Dominion Energy in Richmond, Virginia, and Duke Energy in Charlotte, North Carolina, announced that they would abandon the joint venture, a natural gas pipeline. It was supposed to zigzag about 600 miles through West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina.
It was a surprising twist to a fight that included intense community opposition, a concession from the two companies that they couldn’t beat the overall cost of the project, which had almost doubled to $ 8 billion from its original estimate of about $ 4.5 billion. or uncertainties regarding its possible completion in early 2022, which would have been a delay of almost three and a half years. The high-risk project was formally proposed in 2014, and it was expected to benefit from the Trump administration’s efforts to reverse federal oversight and accelerate construction of large infrastructure projects.
The disappearance of the pipeline was followed on Monday by a federal judge’s decision to temporarily close a pipeline in Dakotas that was the site of major protests in 2016 and 2017 led by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.
While the Atlantic Coast Pipeline had not attracted the same type of attention, there was still open resistance in some communities along its route, including in rural Buckingham County, Virginia, some 70 miles west of Richmond, The state capital.
It was there that a network of lifelong environmental activists and African American residents joined forces to stop the construction of a natural gas compressor station in the historically black community of Union Hill in Buckingham. Some Union Hill families may trace their lineage back to slave and freed ancestors who settled there after the Civil War.
The Friends of Buckingham, a grassroots environmental group that Oba co-founded, mobilized to draw attention to Union Hill. Last year, former Vice President Al Gore and the Rev. William J. Barber II, who have worked together on their respective campaigns on climate change and the poor, came to the community.
Rose, a retired black woman whose home on nearly 2 acres would have been among the closest to the proposed compressor station, said she feels “vindicated” after time spent speaking out against the pipeline and station project, which she feared. compromise it and the health of its neighbors and threaten the quality of air and well water.
“I feel good, I can sleep better at night,” said Rose. “And now I know that I will breathe clean air.”
Rose was the first person Oba called once he learned that the pipe had been scrapped.
“I had always said to Ella, ‘I will be with you until the end. I will never give up on this, and I will be by your side, wherever I am,'” Oba said.
Legal battles against the compressor station and the largest pipeline on the Atlantic coast spanned multiple courts, preventing its progression.
Earlier this year, Oba, Rose, and others in Union Hill celebrated a victory when a panel of three judges from the United States’ 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond unanimously agreed that the Air Pollution Control Board Virginia had not considered how the compressor station project would be disproportionately affecting community residents.
“Environmental justice is not simply a box to check,” Judge Stephanie Thacker wrote in the ruling.
At the time, Dominion, the main stakeholder, promised to resolve the appeals court’s concerns and hoped that construction would resume at the compressor station this summer.
In June, the pipeline project received a key boost after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the pipeline to cross under the Appalachian Trail, a movement opposed by environmental groups who argued that ecosystems and species in Endangered were at risk due to the project.
In a statement Sunday, Dominion CEO Thomas F. Farrell II and Duke CEO Lynn J. Good said the natural gas project, if completed, would have delivered “much-needed infrastructure to our customers and communities. “
“This announcement reflects the growing legal uncertainty that outpaces the development of large-scale industrial and energy infrastructure in the United States,” they added. “Until these problems are resolved, the ability to meet the country’s energy needs will be significantly challenged.”
Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette blamed the “well-funded obstructionist environmental lobby” for killing the project, saying in a statement that the pipeline was set to create thousands of jobs and that the “economic promise of this project is no longer a reality. for thousands of Americans in this region. “
The pipeline had been touted by local leaders and their supporters in Buckingham, a low-income county in Virginia, for what it would have brought financially: $ 1 million annual tax revenue from the compressor station site and job creation in construction. In addition, Dominion offered to donate $ 5.1 million for a proposed community center and other benefits, on the condition that the pipeline be completed first.
Some residents resigned themselves to the idea that Dominion, a Fortune 500 company, was almost guaranteed to earn the necessary permits to move the pipeline and compressor station forward. That belief created a divide between Union Hill residents, pitting neighbors against neighbors and family members with each other.
The loss of the pipeline is an “economic blow” to Buckingham County, said Harry Bryant, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors, adding that the loss of any related revenue now means that officials will need to assess the possibility of increasing property taxes.
He added that despite objections to the pipeline, “most people in the county wanted it.”
While advocates of natural gas advocate it as a better alternative to coal or oil because it produces lower carbon dioxide emissions, environmental groups warn that it still withholds investment in other renewable energy.
“Virginia and North Carolina have taken important steps toward a clean energy future, now the covers are cleared,” said Greg Buppert, lead attorney for the Center for Environmental Law in the South, who has represented the Friends of Buckingham. “People along the route can finally rest.”
Those opponents have included smallholders whose lands were under eminent domain, about 30,000 Native Americans, who live a mile from the proposed pipeline route in North Carolina, and residents of Northampton County, North Carolina, where there is another compressor station for the project, was being built in a census block where 79 percent of the population is black.
Ryan Emanuel, a professor at North Carolina State University and a citizen of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina, who organized against the Atlantic Coast pipeline, said this apparent victory comes at a propitious time in the United States for the Racial justice and conversations about disproportionate affect may have policies about communities of color.
“This is a really encouraging result for underserved communities along the pipeline route,” said Emanuel, who is working on a research paper and book on environmental justice in North Carolina. But he believes that legislation similar to the Clean Water Act of 1972, which sets national water quality standards, is necessary to prevent the effects of environmental racism.
“Environmental justice, for better or for worse, is a kind of buzzword in popular culture and we can interpret it in different ways,” he added. “Until we toughen up what we mean to ensure environmental justice and prevent the impact of structural racism on underserved communities in terms of what infrastructure we build and where, justice will not be for everyone.”
When asked if the environmental justice talks may have taken into account the companies’ choice not to move forward with the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a Dominion spokesperson said, “The press release explains very clearly the reasons why We made this decision. “
Regardless of the reasons, Oba said, he hopes other communities where residents are struggling with projects they perceive as unnecessary and damaging can look to Union Hill for inspiration.
“You can do this, but you must be committed and persistent and you must follow all paths,” said Oba. “Do not think that people will not come to help you, because they will. There are people in this world who believe in justice.”
