Marvin Winstead is one of about a thousand landowners in North Carolina who would be affected by the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
If you look closely, you can see the signs scattered throughout Nash County, poking out from sprawling fields and sun-scorched patches of grass. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some are bright yellow with just one word: DANGER. Others are square and white with a circle and a slash. All of them have the same message, peppering a sleepy, rural stretch of land with a small yelp of protest: No Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
On a hot afternoon in September, Marvin Winstead strides confidently to his sign, propped up against a pile of overgrown grass.
"This is where it's scheduled to go," he says, gesturing to the ground and then pointing across the street, to a dense forest brimming with bushes. "What they'll do is come through here and just knock all these trees down. They don't have any concern for the impact ..." he trails off, shaking his head.
When Winstead talks about the pipeline, he gets angry. Occasionally, he'll launch into a ten-minute diatribe, barely taking a breath. The whippet-thin farmer is sixty-six years old, with kind eyes and a gray mess of hair that juts out from a black baseball cap. Just behind him stretches the seventy-acre farm that has been in his family for generations. It's currently growing soybeans; at other times of the year, it sprouts corn, cotton, and wheat.
Winstead is one of about a thousand landowners in North Carolina who would be affected by the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a $5 billion joint venture by Duke Energy, Dominion Energy, Piedmont Natural Gas, and Southern Company Gas. Forty-two inches in diameter, the pipeline would cross six hundred miles of the Southeast, transporting fracked natural gas from West Virginia through the verdant Shenandoah National Park and into eight eastern North Carolina counties: Northampton, Halifax, Nash, Wilson, Johnston, Sampson, Cumberland, and Robeson.
The project, part of a series of pipelines popping up around the Southeast, would be capable of transporting 1.5 billion cubic feet a day of natural gas to customers in North Carolina and Virginia, according to Atlantic Coast Pipeline LLC, the joint venture of Dominion and Duke. ACP calls it a "vitally important infrastructure project that will ensure the economic vitality, environmental health and energy security of the Mid-Atlantic region."
Across the state, however, a dedicated base of opponents has mobilized, from Asheville to Fayetteville. They worry that the pipeline will cause irreparable environmental damage, lead to rising utility costs, and disproportionately affect poor and minority communities.
In North Carolina alone, they point out, about thirty thousand Native Americans live along the proposed route.
"There's no question that, if you look into it, Native American communities are disproportionately impacted," Winstead says. "These companies are driven by greed. To me, they're traitors to society. They're compromising our safety, our health, and they are harming the air that you breathe."
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Winstead first learned about the pipeline in May 2014, when he received a letter from the project's developers saying they intended to run the pipeline underneath his farm.
"The idea that they want to transport fracked gas across my property is insulting," he says.
An avid environmentalist, Winstead opposes fracking generally and is concerned about the potential harm to the more than 320 waterways the pipeline would cross in North Carolina. He also worries about living so close to the route—in 2016, there were thirty-eight serious pipeline accidents in the U.S., resulting in sixteen deaths and eighty-six injuries, according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration—and the livelihood of his crops.
"It's only common sense that if you're going to come through my farm and dig a deep ditch, no matter what they say when they put it back, it's not going to be the same," he says. "That field, with the nice green luscious soybeans growing, will not be that productive. It will destroy the soil structures, and the fertility will be compromised."
The landowners in the pipeline's path got a reprieve last
Another big decision awaits, as well. Sometime soon, perhaps this month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is expected to issue its approval decision for the project. The developers need both to proceed.
Winstead is currently hedging his bets. He's refused to sign an easement agreement, a one-time payment the developers are offering landowners. (Winstead won't say how much ACP offered him.)
If the project goes ahead and Winstead is in the way, the developers could take him to court under eminent domain laws, an effort to move forward despite his objections.
But until that happens, Winstead says, he won't make the process any easier for ACP than it needs to be.
"They're going to have to get a court order to come in here and survey," he says. "And I'm going to fight it. They may very well construct the pipeline on my property, but the red carpet will not be rolled out for them."
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Since its introduction, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline has been controversial.
The ACP is one of eleven proposed pipeline projects in the Southeast, five of which have already been green-lighted by the FERC. They're part of a natural gas building boom situated in the Appalachian Basin, which is home to the gas-rich Marcellus and Utica shale formations, primarily in Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Over the past decade, natural gas production in the region has shot up, thanks to improvements in fracking technology, which has allowed for access to previously unreachable gas deposits.
Since 2009, natural gas production in the Appalachian Basin has increased thirteen-fold, according to a report last year from the advocacy group Oil Change International. In 2010, the area accounted for just 4 percent of the nation's gas production; by 2030, according to the study, it could supply as much as 50 percent.
"This small region is slated to out-produce the rest of the country by a long way," says Lorne Stockman, senior research analyst at Oil Change International and the primary author of the report. "Pennsylvania would produce more gas than Texas if this all goes ahead. It's a huge geographical shift. It's kind of a frenzy where everyone just wants to get their project built, and there's very little scrutiny on how much of this is really needed."
The boom comes as energy companies—motivated in part by the Obama administration's efforts to reduce carbon emissions from power plants—are turning away from coal-fired power plants and moving instead to the somewhat cleaner natural-gas-powered plants.
In 2016, coal accounted for nearly 70 percent of carbon emissions in the U.S, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The same year, natural gas surpassed coal as the leading source of power generation in the country, providing about 34 percent of America's electricity, compared with coal's 30 percent. (Between 2000 and 2008, coal contributed to 50 percent of the country's energy supply.)
Over the next few years, coal and natural gas are expected to compete for market share, but energy experts agree that coal will never regain its prior dominance. In short: natural gas is here to say.
But a growing number of scientists say the so-called natural gas race could do serious damage to the air and water and pose a threat to the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That's because natural gas is mainly composed of methane, an exceptionally potent greenhouse gas that also contributes to global warming. Although natural gas produces about half as much carbon dioxide as coal when it's burned, the bigger problem occurs when it leaks.
As Bill McKibbin, the founder of 350.org, explained in an op-ed in The Seattle Times, "If [natural gas] leaks unburned into the atmosphere, then methane traps heat about 80 times more effectively, molecule for molecule, than CO2. The point of this chemistry lesson is: If as little as 3 percent of natural gas leaks in the course of fracking and delivering it to the power plant through a pipe, then it's worse than coal. And, sadly, it's now clear that leakage rates are higher than that."
In 2013, he continued, aerial photos of a Utah fracking basin found leakage rates as high as 9 percent.
Given these concerns, ACP opponents ask, why commit to a risky, decades-long fracked gas infrastructure when renewable energy sources are becoming less expensive and more widely adopted?
"Why are we trying to build so fast?" asks Caroline Hansley, the dirty fuels organizing representative for the Sierra Club. "My perspective is that if they get these investments funded by the regulatory agencies at the federal and state level now, they'll be locked in to be able to recoup investments for twenty to thirty years down the road. And every day that goes by, solar and renewables are getting cheaper."
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ACP backers say there's not enough renewable energy to supplant gas. And instead of focusing on environmental impacts, they point instead to what they say will be the project's economic gains.
Look no further than ACP's economic benefit analysis of North Carolina, which estimates that the project's construction will result in $680 million in economic activity, create more than 4,400 jobs, and generate more than a $1 million in annual tax revenue. (Once it's built, ACP says the pipeline will generate nearly $12 million in annual economic activity and 925 jobs.)
It's not hard to understand why that's appealing. The pipeline will make its way through some of the most impoverished parts of North Carolina, areas reeling from vanished industry and factory closures. Many are desperate for any positive economic news.
The eight North Carolina counties the pipeline will traverse all have poverty rates above 15 percent, according to the N.C. Department of Commerce. Halifax County, the fourth-most economically distressed county in the state, has a poverty rate of nearly 26 percent and an unemployment rate of more than 8 percent. And then there is Robeson County, where more than 40 percent of the population is Native American, with a poverty rate of 32 percent; and Wilson County, 40 percent African American, with a poverty rate of 24 percent.
Against that backdrop, Cheryl Parker, the mayor of Selma, a town of about six thousand in Johnston County, endorsed the project. She says her decision came in part from her experience on the Johnston County Economic Advisory Board, which she chairs. There, she says, she sees the natural gas requirements
"In many cases, if you can't check that box that you have it or have access to it, you get no further consideration," she says. "You can count on that maybe as much as nine out of ten times, they want natural gas. And so in order to have manufacturing return to North Carolina, particularly eastern North Carolina, I see it as a necessity."
Opponents say the economic growth claims are inflated, with supporters often recycling ACP's numbers. They point to the FERC's environmental impact statement from July, which found that the project would result in only eighty-two permanent jobs, and just twenty in North Carolina.
"Dominion chose a route that really couldn't be more environmentally destructive—through the steep mountains of western Virginia and West Virginia and through some of the most intact, undeveloped forests in the Southeast," says Greg Buppert, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. "But the Dominion PR machine is very effective and has reached out to local elected officials, state elected officials, and federal elected officials, delivering their message. And unfortunately, that's the information officials are using to make decisions."
Among them is the Trump administration, which has ranked the ACP twentieth on its list of fifty top infrastructure projects. The pipeline has also garnered the support of numerous state lawmakers. In April, sixteen legislators from Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina sent a letter to the FERC, urging officials to approve the pipeline. Among the signatories were Senate leader Phil Berger, House Speaker Tim Moore, and Senate minority leader Dan Blue, a Raleigh Democrat. (Blue, Berger, and Moore did not respond to requests for comment.)
Still, the project isn't a done deal. Before development can begin, the project must be approved by the FERC and a host of state agencies. The DEQ and its Virginia and West Virginia equivalents, for example, need to issue water-quality permits stipulating that the pipeline is in compliance with the Clean Water Act. West Virginia and Virginia have yet to issue their decisions.
And while the DEQ rejected ACP's application last month, Duke Energy said in a statement that the rejection was no big deal: "Disapproval and resubmittal of the application is the process they use to ask for more information or to address their comments."
If the agency ultimately denies the permit, Buppert says, that would be "fatal to the project," though the developers would likely appeal.
Such a rejection would be stunning, opponents say, because of the clout Duke wields. In 2012 and 2014, according to the Institute for Southern Studies' Facing South, the company contributed $944,250 to North Carolina political campaigns and committees. According to campaign finance records, Governor Cooper received $21,000 from Duke Energy from between 1996 and 2008. (Duke supported Cooper's opponent, former Duke
So far, Cooper has yet to make a statement on the project, and his office declined to comment for this story.
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In his black Jeep, Winstead zips down a narrow, tree-lined road in Nash County, pulling over every so often to point out landmarks, like the tiny white church building where Governor Cooper's father attended school. He parks his car and heads down a sloping hill to the shaded banks of a stream known as Swift Creek.
The air is stagnant and muggy, but it's cooler by the shady edge of the creek. The leafy arms of trees fan out over the stream's clear, rock-studded banks. Winstead cranes his neck and points to an area downstream, just out of sight. That's where the pipeline would cross, he says. He ticks off a list of the major state waterways the pipeline would traverse, including the Tar, Roanoke, Neuse, and Cape Fear rivers, as well as the Swift and Fishing creeks.
"It's not far-fetched to say that almost every significant river in eastern North Carolina has the potential to be impacted by this pipeline project," he says.
According to the SELC and the Sierra Club, the project's construction will affect 37,000 feet of 326 waterways and at least 467 acres of wetlands. In those waterways and wetlands, they write in comments submitted to the DEQ, "the blasting and the digging of trenches will occur directly in saturated waters, causing excessive sedimentation and destroying fragile layers of hydric soil that rely on stable, low-oxygen conditions to perform unique wetland functions." That "can seriously impair aquatic life and habitats."
"The builders of the ACP will be causing unnecessary degradation of water quality, of stream health, of the aquatic environment, and all those important species who depend on that environment," says Matthew Starr, the Upper Neuse Riverkeeper. "This is to make money, and they're going to do this at the expense of our streams, out water quality, and our environment."
The SELC and Sierra Club dispute ACP's estimate that the project will result in less than an acre of wetland loss. Instead, they say, "390 acres of forested wetlands will be deforested, or take over a century to recover—if recovery ever occurs." That loss, they argue, can "dramatically reduce the particular wetland's ability to store storm and floodwaters, which is essential given that North Carolina will likely experience future extreme storm events like Hurricane Matthew."
"The SELC's comments do not reflect the reality of how pipelines safely operate all across our country every single day," Dominion spokesman Aaron Ruby counters in an email. "We've taken tremendous care throughout the entire process to protect water quality. We're using some of the most protective construction methods ever used by the industry. We've also taken an unprecedented level of avoidance to minimize impacts on the environment. We've made hundreds of route adjustments to avoid environmentally sensitive areas, including wetlands, wildlife habitats, and countless water sources. It isn't just us that disagrees with the SELC."
Ruby points to the FERC's final environmental impact statement, which concluded that the project would "not result in a significant cumulative impact on the environment." The pipeline would result in "some adverse effects," but those could largely be reduced to "
But what if they don't?
In the past year, nineteen pipeline accidents have resulted in three deaths and twenty-five injuries, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Those incidents include several major spills: in January, the Ozark pipeline spilled more than fifteen thousand gallons of oil in Missouri; in April, the Buffalo pipeline leaked nearly nineteen thousand gallons of oil onto farmland in Oklahoma; in July, the Longhorn pipeline spilled more than eighty-seven thousand gallons of oil in Texas.
Oil Change International's Stockman points to the embattled Rover pipeline as an example of a natural gas pipeline gone awry. The multibillion-dollar pipeline, which would travel from the Marcellus shale to the Midwest and Canada, got the OK from the FERC in February and is currently under construction. Already, though, it's facing more than $2.3 million in fines from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency for dozens of environmental violations, including disposing of industrial waste near drinking water sources and spilling two million gallons of drilling fluid into Ohio wetlands.
To date, the pipeline has received thirteen environmental violations from the Ohio EPA, more than any other major interstate natural gas pipeline built in the last two years, according to a Bloomberg analysis.
You shouldn't be worried about that happening here, says Duke Energy spokeswoman Tammie McGee.
"You have to know that we have thousands of miles of pipelines right now," she says. "Right this minute. [Pipelines have] been rated the safest way to transport natural gas or to transport energy. It's far safer by transporting by rail or by truck, and it's closely overseen by the Department of Transportation after it's in operation. We have multiple layers of safety in the pipeline, and it starts with manufacturing, the thickness of pipes, external and internal coding—we have the ability to cut off parts of the line from other parts of the line almost instantaneously if our sensors detect any kind of abnormality."
McGee continues: "In all that we do, safety is our number one priority. We live it every single day. Dominion has a similar philosophy, so we are putting all precautions in place to ensure the safety of the communities where we will be working."
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John Whittemore climbs down a muddy path to the mouth of the Cape Fear River. Along the way, he's greeted by a spider web, which he gingerly moves aside. He gazes across the water. There's a large pile of branches stacked up,
"It got so bad," Whittemore recalls. "You think about stuff like that, and you think, if we had a major pipeline right here during that, it would have busted."
Whittemore, thirty-four years old, is Tuscarora—one of the local native tribes in eastern North Carolina—and is one of
"Culturally, I identify with this land," he says. "It's my territorial homeland."
Whittemore's story adds another dimension to the battle over the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, one that has drawn comparisons to the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. Thousands of activists converged on North Dakota last year to oppose the construction of a pipeline that would run near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Soon after President Trump took office, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved the pipeline, which the Obama administration had halted in December. In June, however, a federal judge ordered the corps to reconsider its permits for the project.
According to a July article in the journal Science written by Ryan Emanuel, an associate professor at N.C. State and member of the Lumbee Tribe, nearly thirty thousand Native Americans live within 1.6 kilometers of the proposed pipeline and comprise 13 percent of the people potentially affected by it.
Emanuel crunched the same data federal regulators used for their draft environmental statement, but he says he found flaws in their analysis that masked the pipeline's impact on Native American communities. Those flaws, he wrote, "rendered FERC's analysis incapable of detecting large Native American populations along the route, leading to false conclusions about the project's impacts."
The FERC wasn't swayed by his criticism. In its final environmental impact statement, the agency concluded that "environmental justice populations would not be disproportionately affected" by the project.
Emanuel doesn't buy it. "We treat wetlands better than we treat poor and minority people in environmental justice reviews," he says. He says it's ironic that all of this is playing out in eastern North Carolina. The region, after all, is where the environmental justice movement began in the early
What's happening now, Emanuel says, is a textbook example of an environmental justice violation—in a place that invented the textbook.
"It's a really powerful symbol to me," he says. "It speaks to the fact that this is not a priority for the regulators and developers, it's just a box they want to check and to move on to the next thing."
If the pipeline goes ahead, Whittemore says, the community is prepared to engage in the kind of activism that gave rise to the environmental justice movement in the first place.
"We like to think that this isn't going to happen," he says. "We really are fighting it permit to permit to permit. But if that doesn't happen, we're prepared to have another Standing Rock."
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Ultimately, this decision isn't up to activists or state politicians or even Duke Energy. It rests with state and federal agencies, including the DEQ and the FERC.
The latter has opponents worried.
A recent investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found the FERC's approval process to be nearly a rubber stamp. In the past thirty years, the agency has rejected just two pipelines out of hundreds of proposals.
"At best," the investigators wrote, "FERC officials superficially probe projects' ramifications for the changing climate, despite persistent calls by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for deeper analyses. FERC's assessments of need are based largely on company filings. That's not likely to change with a pro-infrastructure president who can now fill four open seats on the five-member commission."
Since then, President Trump has filled two of those four open seats.
The FERC is currently composed of three members: Cheryl A. LaFleur, Neil Chatterjee, and Robert F. Powelson; the latter two were confirmed by the Senate in August.
Chatterjee was previously energy policy adviser for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and helped lead the campaign against the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan. Powelson, who served on the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, has criticized Maryland governor Larry Hogan for calling for a ban on fracking and argued that pipeline opponents are involved in a "jihad" against natural gas.
Asked about this apparent pro-pipeline predilection, FERC media liaison Craig Cano referred the INDY to a 2014 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which reads in part: "Presumably under most regulatory schemes, by the time applicants and their expert counsel have worked through changes, adaptations, and amendments, they are not likely to pursue many certificates that are hopeless. The fact that they generally succeed in choosing to expend their resources on applications that serve their own financial interests does not mean that an agency which recognizes merit in such applications is biased."
[page]ACP opponents, dubious that the FERC will break with tradition, are instead placing their bets with the DEQ, which is run by the Cooper administration.
"It will be a courageous political decision when the Cooper administration decides to weigh in and deny this permit," says Greg Yost. He's standing in front of the DEQ offices in Raleigh in September, on day nine of a one-man, two-week fast to protest the ACP. (He ended up finishing on day
Clark hoists a familiar sign in the air, one of the "no pipeline" posters that are commonplace in Nash County. He lives along the pipeline route—about one thousand yards from where it is expected to cross, he says—but feels like his safety is an afterthought. What would happen if a gas leak or an explosion occurs, he wonders.
"I live in the sacrifice zone," he says. "I don't think you or anybody else would like your family to be considered sacrificial."
Clark's county, Cumberland, is among those that could be at risk in case of an explosion. In North Carolina, the FERC's final environmental impact statement identified twenty-four areas known as "high consequence" zones—where, in the case of a pipeline rupture, there's the chance of property damage, injury, or death. They're situated in seven of the eight counties along the route—Cumberland, Northampton, Halifax, Nash, Wilson, Johnston, and Robeson.
A report by Clean Water for North Carolina calculated that the blast zone—the area where people could be hurt or killed if a pipeline explodes—extends 943 feet, a significantly larger estimate than the ACP's 660-foot estimate. Clark's fears aren't theoretical: since 1997, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, pipeline accidents have killed more than 320 people, injured more than 1,300, and cost more than $7 billion in property damage.
"If I go to bed tonight, I may not wake up in the morning," Clark says. "And I have to live the rest of my life that way? Every time I leave home, I have to worry when I go back if my wife will be all right."
Clark pauses, overcome with emotion.
"My grandmother passed away when I was six months old," he eventually says. "My grandfather continued for decades farming and keeping this farm together by himself, so his family could have land. I always dreamed of living there. Now Duke and Dominion
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