One West Virginia County Tried to Break Its Dependence on the Energy Industry. It Was Overruled.
After seeing the scars of coal, Fayette County banned the disposal of natural gas drilling waste. Industry fought back, arguing the community doesn’t get a say.
by Ken Ward Jr., The Charleston Gazette-Mail May 4, 5 a.m. EDT
This article was produced in partnership with the Charleston Gazette-Mail, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.
FAYETTEVILLE, W.Va. — Matt Wender’s vision for Fayette County begins with the New River Gorge. Whitewater rafters, hikers and mountain bikers congregate there every summer. Craft beer and artisan pizza are helping his home emerge as an outdoor tourism hub.
Just upstream from the river, there’s another reality: A company called Danny Webb Construction Inc. pumps waste from natural gas drilling underground. Chloride, strontium, lithium and other markers of gas waste have been found in Wolf Creek, which flows into the river.
In the southeast corner of the county, developers of a 300-mile gas pipeline hope to turn a wooded, 130-acre plot into the site of a gas compressor station, a facility local leaders say would be noisy and would change the inviting nature of the area.
Fayette County is more than 150 miles from the vast reserves in Northern West Virginia that fueled skyrocketing gas production over the past decade. But the infrastructure to support the drilling crisscrosses the state: new pipelines, a host of processing plants, compressor stations and — industry supporters hope — a new generation of sprawling chemical factories and manufacturing plants.
https://www.propublica.org/article/fayette-county-west-virginia-energy-natural-gas-coal-dependence
This is really fucked up
= new reply since forum marked as read
new venues and still the beautiful, rugged state is under the control of industry and politics for most of 100+ years.
"Medieval West Virginia" Ireland-born Mother Jones called it, she would know.
the fracking gas states to allow building of massive processing plants for the gas. And, when the gas starts petering out in a few decades, they will pull out and leave the same kind of environmental and economic mess that coal has.
Of course, Repug legislators are painting this as the state's ultimate salvation, as usual. They could care less if the entire nation is turned into a wasteland so long as they get their cut.
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