For decades, dozens of petrochemical companies have built their plants along the Mississippi River in Louisiana between Baton Rouge and the Gulf. These facilities are located right next to neighborhoods and belch out all kinds of toxic emissions. Not coincidentally, that strip is known as “Cancer Alley,” due to the higher rates of cancer among residents who live there.
Now, gas and oil companies are promoting a plan to build a similar concentration of industrial plants along a stretch of the Ohio River, from its headwaters near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania south to Huntington, West Virginia, and beyond. Known as the Appalachian Storage Hub, federal lawmakers, especially in West Virginia, see the Hub as a jobs bonanza, but many residents and activists don’t want to be guinea pigs for a new potential Ohio River “Cancer Alley.”
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Robin Blakeman, project coordinator with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, or OVEC, which has taken the lead in educating residents and elected officials about the down side of the proposed project. Here, Blakeman discusses the environmental and health hazards linked to a future Appalachian petrochemical Storage Hub.
ROBIN BLAKEMAN: Most of our federal level legislators seem to be salivating over this because of what they think is gonna be a lot of jobs and revenue and whatever. The perspective we take on it is it seems to be an industrial attempt to grid up the Ohio River Valley from Beaver, Pennsylvania to at least Huntington, West Virgina with a bunch of petrochemical processing, storage and transportation infrastructure. There are five to seven cracker plants that have been discussed in this project. A cracker plant is a large facility – it’s kind of descriptive, actually – it cracks the various components of natural gas apart, using chemical processes. It uses a lot of water. It can have a lot of air pollution implications to extract the parts of natural gas that would be useful in plastics and other commercial applications such as propane and butane and all that. It will be a massive complex that utilizes a lot of water from the river or other sources, and also has a lot of air pollution implications, and probably noise, and discharges into the river and that kind of thing.
The other major concern we have about the whole complex is that it will encourage a second or third wave of gas fracking in our region, from the Marcellus, the Utica, and the Rogersville field, which is a much deeper layer of shale gas and oil and has been recently tested and a few commercial wells have been built into it. It’s not commercially viable yet, but we think this complex will make it commercially viable.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Robin Blakeman, I know you don’t have a lot of details, but can you tell us anything specific about the proposed storage hub?
ROBIN BLAKEMAN: Storage and transfer pipelines that are part of this complex, there will be at least six, and we’ve heard there might be as many as 15 liquefied natural gas product pipelines involved in this somehow, either coming in from various directions as connector lines or as the main part of this hub.
BETWEEN THE LINES: This no doubt would be a lot of jobs, so isn’t that a good thing?
ROBIN BLAKEMAN: Jobs are good, but we believe the potential environmental risk on a regional, local and global scale, actually, is not worth it. The Ohio River is the tap water source for three to five million people, and so a major spill or several occurrences with leakages of this highly volatile and poisonous substance that will be in the salt caverns and the pipelines could be devastating.
BETWEEN THE LINES: I’ve heard references that this storage hub would be like another Cancer Alley, where huge petrochemical plants line the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to south of New Orleans, and where some cancers occur at a higher rate than in the population overall.
ROBIN BLAKEMAN: It’s very similar in terms of both the products and the pollution. Of course these would be newer plants, but that doesn’t guarantee they’d be better plants and/or storage lines. We’ve seen industry reports on this – news releases, etc. – and some of them suggest this hub – the Appalachian Storage Hub – is being built to provide an inland location for processing facilities and storage of liquefied natural gas products in order to provide more weather-resilient locations for such things. The way we’re interpreting that is that they’re moving the locations of some of these facilities – or want to move the locations of some of these facilities – inland to the Ohio River Valley, to avoid the effects of climate change on more coastal areas, like the Gulf Coast.
BETWEEN THE LINES: And of course it’s this kind of fossil fuel development that is increasing the impacts of climate change. What are next steps in fighting the Appalachian Storage Hub?
ROBIN BLAKEMAN: We see ASH – the Appalachian Storage Hub – as the biggest threat we have heard of for a long time to the tap water source for three to five million people. As well, a lot of people use the Ohio River for recreational purposes; it’s a transport highway for barges and riverboats. It would be devastating to have the Ohio River damaged. OVEC is based in Huntington, West Virginia, and Huntington has two water intakes, both on the Ohio River. So if something happens there, our entire city would be without tap water. We are building a network of groups, from Beaver, Pennsylvania – we have allies up in that area, near Pittsburgh – in Ohio, Ohio Sierra Club. West Virginia Sierra Club is starting to look at it. We have built a coalition called the Appalachian Gas Working Group in West Virginia. And, you know, in addition to opposing this, we want to be a proponent of renewable energy as well – solar, wind, some hydro projects, etc.
For more information, visit the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition at ohvec.org.
