By Peter Galuszka
One hundred and seventy-eight Virginians will be getting not-so-merry Christmas presents from the electric utility Dominion Resources soon – official notifications that lawsuits have been filed against them that Dominion demands access to their land so it can survey for a $5 billion natural gas pipeline.
According to the Waynesboro News Virginian, Dominion sued 20 Nelson County property owners and 27 more in Augusta County earlier this week. The rest may be sued in the near future and they will have three weeks to respond.
Dominion is one of several southeastern utilities that want to build the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a 42-inch wide tube stretching from near Clarksburg, W.Va. across the Appalachians and southeastward into Augusta, Nelson and other Virginia counties before heading on down to North Carolina a Tidewater. The pipeline is to transport new natural gas produced by hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” in the Marcellus Shale formation that stretches from New York on into Virginia.
Dominion’s spokesmen say they have the right to cross private property to survey land for a possible pipeline route if they have asked for permission and have not received it. Not so, say some people I spoke with in Nelson County. Anne Buteau who runs an organic farm there told me that the law does not explicitly give Dominion the right to trespass on their land if they say no as many have. It just says that Dominion can ask and if they get no response, then they can move in, she says.
This will obviously be a legal issue to resolve as the cases move into the court. And, this is all pretty new stuff to Virginians who much haven’t had to contend with big energy firms encroaching on their land.
Go a little west and southwest, of course, and it’s a whole different story. As a former West Virginia resident I know well how coal firms will go as far as they can encroaching on private property and streams to get at coal seams they want to blast apart in surface mines. Subsidence from deep mines is also a long-standing problem.
Such a swarm of issues has been around for a century and a half in the coalfields, but not in the picture perfect areas such as Nellsyford in Nelson County. It’s a rude awakening since America’s energy revolution is truly stirring things up and confronting people with issues they hadn’t dealt with before.
I’m of two minds of it. First, natural gas is still safer than coal which still provides maybe 35 percent of our electricity. Fracking has also produced a boomtown rush of shale gas and oil that has turned the American position completely around in a very few years to the country’s advantage. It is fueling a long-in-coming economic recovery and giving the U.S. the economic muscle to tell Vladimir Putin and the Iranians where to stick it.
Yet, fracking does pollute and it does release methane from improperly drilled wells. Pipelines can and do explode and catch fire. It seems odd (and something one never reads about in Virginia) that New York has decided to keep its ban on fracking for gas. Do they know something that Virginia’s leadership doesn’t? Or are we just going to dismiss them as clueless Yankees?
Dominion is pushing ahead hard for this deal, presumably, because its window isn’t really that large. One has to ask, what’s the rush? Prices for natural gas, along with crude oil prices, are dramatically low. So low, in fact, that the mad dash to frack seems to be dampening. There is even talk in the Wall Street Journal that low global crude prices might make the highly controversial Keystone XL pipeline economically unneeded and too much hassle.
My guess as to why Dominion wants the ACP so badly and so fast is that it now has the chance to share the $5 billion cost (assuming it doesn’t get another unsolicited multi-million dollar donation from the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission) with several other utilities. It does need to think about future generation needs as old coal-fired and other plants shut down. Building a new nuke at North Anna might cost $15 billion – a lot more. Dominion isn’t saying. Gas is now cheaper and acceptable.
One also wonders why Dominion can’t figure out pipelines routes that are not so upsetting. Why couldn’t they use rights of way along Interstate 81 or other highway? Why not workout deals to put them near existing rail lines?
As I work in my office waiting for lame callbacks during the holidays, I have taken to watching old westerns on Netflix. I just finished “The Sons of Katie Elder.” I haven’t watched them in years and never was that big a fan but I have to admit, there are some really story lines there.
A recurring theme has to do with land rights – be it water, a railroad, gold, whatever. And fighting for one’s personal property is as American as John Wayne on a horse. So, I say, ride on! Stay with it, Pilgrims!
