This article discusses Virginia Governor Northam’s recalcitrance in stopping Dominion Energy’s pipelines.
Two weeks ago, Gov. Ralph Northam’s Advisory Council on Environmental Justice sent him the final version of a letter long in the works — the latest in a lengthy series of attempts to push Northam’s administration somewhere it steadfastly refuses to go.
The council had telegraphed its recommendations months ago on the ultra contentious Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley pipelines during a meeting in May in Buckingham County, where Dominion Energy, the lead partner in the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, wants to site a giant compressor station for the project.
If Dominion gets its way, it will be building the nearly 54,000-horsepower compressor station — which comes with a host of nasty emissions, periodic mass releases of gas called “blowdowns” and the risk of an explosion — on a piece of land that was part of a former slave plantation and in a largely black community, Union Hill, where many trace their lineage to the freedmen who toiled there.
The project would be one of three compressor stations for the 600-mile pipeline but the only one in Virginia.