Energy & Environment Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Mountain Valley Pipeline Bursts During Pressure Testing In Virginia

A landowner observed sediment-laden water in her pasture on Wednesday morning and reported it to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.

A section of the Mountain Valley Pipeline ruptured during pressure testing Wednesday in Roanoke County, Virginia, according to a report from the state’s environmental agency.

A landowner observed sediment-laden water in her pasture on Wednesday morning and reported it to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.

The agency sent a construction compliance expert to investigate the origin of the water.

“The origin of the sediment-laden water reported in the complaint was from the rupture of a section of pipe during hydrostatic testing the morning of 5/1/2024,” wrote the expert, John McCutcheon.

The 300-mile MVP is undergoing pressure testing with water in anticipation of beginning operations later this month.

MVP’s builder, Equitrans Midstream, has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for permission to put the natural gas pipeline in service after May 23.

The company entered an agreement with the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration last year to ensure sections of pipe that had been exposed to the elements had not lost their corrosion-resistant coating.

Court challenges led to long pauses in construction until Congress last year required the project’s completion.

In its first quarter earnings report Tuesday, Equitrans Midstream said the project’s cost had increased to $7.85 billion, more than twice the original estimate.

McCutcheon’s report indicated that crews were preparing the site of the rupture for repairs.

Abandoned Mine Turns Apple Orchard With Help Of National Guard

A long winding road, once frequented by coal trucks, leads to the top of what used to be a mountain. At its end are flat fields filled with budding apple trees.

Major General Bill Crane said this apple orchard was an abandoned mine seven years ago.

“We’ve got about 20,000 apple trees in the ground,” Crane said. “It’s an experimentation site that we work with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).”

This is one way the National Guard is taking on climate change and pollution. The Guard has teamed up with scientists from the USDA and West Virginia University (WVU) to find ways to grow apple trees on land that was previously thought to be somewhat of a waste land.

First they had to tackle one major problem: No topsoil. The solution: Chicken poop from pastures in the state.

“The nice thing we’re doing here is we’re bringing chicken manure from the Eastern Panhandle, we bring it here to help make the soil better,” Crane said.

Chris Dardick, a scientist with the USDA, said taking the chicken manure from the Eastern Panhandle to the orchard helps mitigate farming runoff into rivers. He said nitrogen from animal waste has been running into rivers, and creating algae blooms, which cause other aquatic life to die.

“Much of [chicken manure] contains nitrogen,” Dardick said. “Bringing it out here, out of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and using it to amend the soils for apple production or other crops, that’s sort of a win-win.”

Tracy Leskey works with Dardick at the USDA as the research leader for this project and said the trees absorb another climate changing element — carbon.

“One of the things that we recognized a few years ago is this opportunity for apple trees to sequester carbon from the atmosphere,” Leskey said.

Trees take in carbon, and store it in their trunks and roots, or deliver it to the ground. The process is known as carbon sequestering and is one tool for fighting climate change.

And where the land had carbon removed from the soil in the form of coal, Leskey said the soil can now hold, or sequester, more carbon than the typical soil can.

But this project isn’t only aimed at helping the earth. Melissa Stewart, director of Patriot Guardens, hopes this project will also help the mental health of both active and retired service members.

“When they come back home from a deployment, and maybe they have seen some things that they don’t want to remember, they can’t have a conversation with somebody to get that out of their mind?” Stewart said.

She hopes that service members can create a “side hustle” and learn a hobby that brings peace and healing.

“Through agriculture, they can work with their hands, in an atmosphere like this,” Stewart said.

This is one of many projects the National Guard is working on to produce food like peaches, strawberries and arugula in the state. These projects are aimed at combating food insecurity in West Virginia where one in seven children experience hunger. Stewart says this is where the farming work takes on a special meaning for service members who are transitioning out of the service.

“To take that need to serve and give it purpose as they come out a uniform, being able to illustrate that they’re still serving our state as they transition into more of a civilian status by helping grow the food that helps feed our families helps feed our state,” Stewart said.

It Took 41 Years To Add A Union Carbide Landfill To EPA Database. Why?

Five years after the site’s existence became publicly known as part of a federal lawsuit, it remains unclear who dropped the ball in failing to list the site as required by federal law.

After Congress passed the landmark Superfund law in December 1980, Union Carbide and other companies were required to report hazardous waste sites to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency by the following June.

Union Carbide’s Filmont landfill in South Charleston, then an active industrial waste disposal site, was not added to the EPA Superfund database until October 2022, more than 41 years later.

Five years after the site’s existence became publicly known as part of a federal lawsuit, it remains unclear who dropped the ball in failing to list the site as required by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act – the longer name for Superfund.

“Both the state and the EPA have some culpability here for ignoring this problem for such a long time,” said Pat McGinley, a law professor at West Virginia University who specializes in environmental cases.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia last September ruled that the landfill was an illegal open dump and that Union Carbide violated the Clean Water Act by failing to ask for a stormwater discharge permit for the facility.

Senior Judge John T. Copenhaver Jr. will soon decide how much Union Carbide, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, will pay in civil penalties. The plaintiff in the case, Courtland Company, has asked for a judgment of $1.4 billion and that the EPA supervise the cleanup, rather than the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.

Union Carbide has asked Copenhaver to dismiss Courtland’s proposals.

Despite the quiet addition of the Filmont site to the Superfund database less than two years ago, the EPA, the WVDEP and Union Carbide have said it is not a Superfund site.

To be sure, it is not on the National Priorities List, which includes 1,300 of the most polluted places in the country – 11 are in West Virginia.

But Kelly Offner, a spokeswoman for EPA’s Region 3, which includes West Virginia, said it could qualify based on a future assessment.

“It’s in the hands of the state for now, but the option to exercise EPA resources and oversight through the Superfund program is there,” she said. “We generally consider a site a Superfund site once it’s utilizing EPA resources/oversight and on the (National Priorities List).”

Offner said that the agency does not have an immediate plan to conduct its own investigation.

For now, the site is part of WVDEP’s Voluntary Remediation Program. Union Carbide is paying for the work, including a licensed remediation specialist, David Carpenter, who testified in the Courtland lawsuit against adding the site to the National Priorities List.

Filmont was in operation from the 1950s to the 1980s, according to court documents and testimony.

WVDEP and some local officials knew about the Filmont landfill’s existence as far back as 2009, but there was no public mention of it until Courtland filed its first of four lawsuits in 2018.

And even then, it would be another four years before the site was added to the Superfund database.

McGinley said he sees a pattern of inaction on multiple levels.

“There’s a lot of history here of government inaction. And EPA is the agency of the ultimate resort here. I mean, they’re supposed to be reviewing what state agencies, how they carry out their responsibilities under federal law,” he said.

EPA, For Now, Defers To State Officials On Union Carbide Landfill Cleanup

Union Carbide is working with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) on a voluntary remediation of the Filmont landfill. The site is the subject of an ongoing federal lawsuit over water pollution and was listed by EPA as a Superfund site.

This story has been updated to clarify the nature of the relationship between WVDEP and a licensed remediation specialist who is paid under contract by Union Carbide.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it is letting state officials supervise the cleanup of a South Charleston landfill and has no immediate plans to conduct an investigation of the site.

It was not, though, placed on the National Priorities List, which includes 1,300 of the nation’s most contaminated places, 11 of which are in West Virginia.

An adjacent property owner, Courtland Company, is seeking a $1.4 billion civil penalty against Union Carbide in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia. It also seeks an injunction that requires EPA supervision of the cleanup.

Senior Judge John T. Copenhaver Jr. has yet to rule on Courtland’s proposals. Union Carbide has asked Copenhaver to dismiss them.

Last September, Copenhaver ruled that the Filmont site was an illegal open dump under the Resource Recovery and Conservation Act and that the company violated the Clean Water Act by not seeking a wastewater discharge permit for the facility, which operated for three decades.

Filmont is adjacent to Davis Creek, a tributary of the Kanawha River.

At the time, Mike Callaghan, an attorney for Courtland, called the ruling a “David versus Goliath victory.” At its peak, the company employed 12,000 workers in West Virginia, making it one of the state’s largest.

Though some state and local officials knew about the landfill for more than a decade, its existence wasn’t publicly revealed until 2019 after Courtland first sued Union Carbide.

Union Carbide, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, has said the site poses no imminent or substantial harm to the environment or human health. Union Carbide did not respond to a request for comment.

Terry Fletcher, a spokesman for the WVDEP, said the inclusion of Filmont in the Superfund database does not affect the ongoing voluntary remediation of the site. He added that the agency is coordinating with the EPA.

Kelly Offner, a spokeswoman for the EPA’s Region 3, which includes West Virginia, said the agency added Filmont to the Superfund Active Site Inventory in 2022, working with DEP.

She said the EPA has no immediate plans to conduct a preliminary assessment of the site.

“The EPA will continue to support the WVDEP on their site investigation,” she said.

The WVDEP is working closely with Union Carbide.

David Carpenter, a licensed remediation specialist who testified that WVDEP could complete the work faster than the EPA, works for a company called ERM. His work on the Filmont remediation is paid for by Union Carbide under contract with the state. He also testified that the Filmont site does not meet the criteria to be placed on the National Priorities List, which the EPA oversees.

Additionally, WVDEP project managers who perform oversight of the remediation work are paid by Union Carbide.

Fletcher said the arrangement is required by state law. He said the structure ensures that the financial burden of the remediation is kept off taxpayers, while keeping the Voluntary Remediation Program viable.

Hope Gas Asks PSC To Block Pipeline From Supplying Pleasants Plant

Quantum Pleasants is talking to a pipeline developer, Icon New Energy Pipeline, about an agreement to supply the plant with the volume of gas it needs and at a lower cost.

Hope Gas has asked the Public Service Commission to block another supplier from providing gas to the Pleasants Power Station.

The Pleasants Power Station was sold last year to a California Company, Omnis Technologies, that plans to produce graphene and graphite and run the power plant on the hydrogen byproduct.

That will require a lot of natural gas: 100 million cubic feet a year by the end of 2025. The plant, now Quantum Pleasants, told the PSC in a Wednesday filing that Hope Gas cannot supply that volume.

Instead, Quantum Pleasants is talking to a pipeline developer, Icon New Energy Pipeline, about an agreement to supply the plant with the volume of gas it needs and at a lower cost than Hope.

Hope wants the PSC to review whether the arrangement would violate state law because the plant is an existing customer.

Omnis said the law doesn’t apply because the company has never been a customer of Hope. It asked the commission to dismiss Hope’s request.

In its own filing Wednesday, Icon said the PSC does not have jurisdiction over the company except for pipeline safety. It told the commission it supported the Omnis motion to dismiss.

The potential closure of the Pleasants Power Station, which dates to 1979, caused considerable outcry from lawmakers.

The plant shut down, briefly, last June but was reactivated when Omnis agreed to buy the plant from Energy Harbor.

State lawmakers had passed a resolution urging Mon Power to purchase the plant. The sale to Omnis made it moot.

EPA Lists Union Carbide South Charleston Landfill As Superfund Site

An ongoing case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia will determine whether Union Carbide, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, will pay civil penalties.

This is a developing story and may be updated. The original story misstated the number of National Priorities List sites in West Virginia. It has been corrected.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has listed a closed Union Carbide landfill in South Charleston as a Superfund site, joining some of the most contaminated places in the country.

An ongoing case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia will determine whether Union Carbide, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, will pay civil penalties.

Courtland, a property owner that sued Union Carbide, is seeking a $1.4 billion civil penalty against the company over pollution resulting from the dumping of toxic material. Courtland also has sought an injunction from the court that would put the cleanup under EPA supervision.

The Courtland and Union Carbide Filmont sites are directly beside Davis Creek and close to where the creek enters the Kanawha River.

Illustration by Eric Douglas

Last year, Senior Judge John T. Copenhaver Jr. found that the site, called the Filmont landfill, was an illegal open dump under federal law. He also found that Union Carbide violated the Clean Water Act by failing to seek a stormwater discharge permit for the facility.

Copenhaver dismissed two of Courtland’s four lawsuits against Union Carbide.

Last month, Union Carbide asked Copenhaver to reject the civil penalty and the injunction.

The company has said it’s pursuing a voluntary remediation with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection that would achieve the same goals as an EPA-supervised cleanup and would take less time to complete.

Pat McGinley, a law professor at West Virginia University who specializes in environmental law, said the Superfund listing could affect the outcome of the case.

“It brings EPA into the process of determining the appropriate remedial action,” he said, “obviously not what the defendant prefers.”

In a court filing dated April 30, Mike Callaghan, an attorney for Courtland, noted that the Superfund listing did not place the Filmont site on the National Priorities List. That list currently includes 1,340 of the most polluted sites across the country. Eleven are in West Virginia.

However, Callaghan noted that the EPA intends to conduct a preliminary assessment on the site, where Union Carbide had dumped various contaminants from the 1950s to the 1980s.

“Counsel is further exploring the significance of this site being listed under EPA’s Superfund Site Information and the impacts that may have on this litigation,” Callaghan wrote.

The Superfund program was created by Congress in 1980 after one of the most famous toxic sites in U.S. history, the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting has asked Union Carbide, the EPA’s Region 3 office and the WVDEP for comment.