 The Covanta waste incinerator, the largest in the country, burns as much as 3,500 tons of trash a day. Credit: Zulene Mayfield Penn America’s proposal, which was discussed with state and local officials for five years before the public learned about it, would build a liquefaction facility on 100 acres of land along the Chester waterfront to support the export of 7 million tons of LNG each year. It would require new pipeline to carry natural gas from the Utica and Marcellus shale fields in the Appalachian basin. The gas would then be cooled down to minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit to be shipped out in its liquid state as part of a broader U.S. push to dominate the LNG export market, with backing from the Biden administration. A new LNG facility and terminal would impact the entire region because of the infrastructure required to operate it and the environmental degradation it would cause over time, according to Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, an environmental group that has been fighting a proposed LNG export terminal in Gibbstown, New Jersey, just across the river, since 2019. It would also bring significant safety concerns, she told EHN, given that LNG expands more than 600 times in volume as soon as it escapes its container, creating the potential for an enormous and highly flammable vapor cloud if anything goes wrong. In the case of a leak, even something as simple as someone starting their car or lighting a cigarette could ignite such a cloud, releasing “a fearsome amount of energy,” Fred Millar, an environmental consultant on the transportation of dangerous cargo, told EHN. “There’s no place to put it that is not going to be an unbearable, intolerable burden for the people who live near it,” Carluccio said. Congress has long advised that LNG proponents “seek remote siting,” Millar said, because of the potential for disaster if a facility is placed within or nearby a community. He points to a 2004 LNG explosion in Algeria that killed 30 people, as well as a 2014 explosion at a facility along Washington’s Columbia River that forced the evacuation of 400 residents. The majority of LNG processing and export in the U.S. takes place in the Gulf Coast, particularly on Louisiana’s rural coastline. “They’re having a harder and harder time trying to find property that is sufficiently distant from populations, so they’re trying to squeeze something in,” Millar says. “If the safety considerations were being taken seriously, you wouldn’t want it anywhere near a populated area.” Penn America’s plan would create a buffer zone that would displace 108 homes, four churches and a daycare, Mayfield said. It would also add to the environmental injustice burdening a city with just five square miles of land but an abundance of treatment and processing facilities that have proliferated since the incinerator became “a beacon” to industry, she said. Penn America did not respond to requests for comment on its plans. Its CEO, Franc James, told WHYY News last year that the company is focused on being “a responsible and generous corporate citizen dedicated to making life better for all those nearby, as we ensure the local environment is always a priority and safeguarded.” “This proposal,” Carluccio said, “puts an exclamation point on what was already going on there. It has threatened to make it worse by layering another host of environmental degradation on top of the community.”
Chester’s changing climate
|
