How To Stop A Toxic Factory By Cutting Off Its Energy Supply

When Heavy Industry Comes To Paradise

My wife and I moved to a small town in West Virginia twenty-two years ago to raise free-range children. We bought a home nestled in the woods on the river just upstream from Shepherdstown, a progressive enclave affectionately known as "Mayberry on Acid." The internet was on the rise and we figured we could settle anywhere and make a go of it as a family. We picked the place where we would have wanted to grow up if the choice had been ours.

We're fortunate. Two of our kids have already flown the coop; one has embarked on a career in her field and the other recently entered his third year of college, and our youngest will graduate high school this spring. While Monica & I had planned to stay in this spot and pass our home along when one of our children is ready to start a family, moving wouldn't be a major ordeal.

Many of our friends and neighbors are not so lucky. They might have children in an elementary school across the road from the former Jefferson Orchards, or in one of three other schools within a mile of this site where Rockwool, a Danish company, plans to construct a factory.  If the factory gets built, several smokestacks, including one 21 stories tall, will emit toxic fumes and particulate matter, including over a dozen "hazardous air pollutants" with six human carcinogens, 24 hours a day as it melts basalt rock to produce insulation.

In many ways, it feels as if we've been asleep all these years. At the eastern tip of the Mountain State, we're farther from our governor's mansion in Charleston than we are from New York City, and we're about an hour drive to the Capital Beltway that rings Washington, DC. With the Potomac River on our northern border, the Shenandoah winding through the east and the oldest mountain range on earth to the west and south it's easy to become complacent about life in Jefferson County.

While we've enjoyed the privilege of our geography, our fellow West Virginians have endured toxic sludge and poisoned water from mine waste and industrial accidents, rivers polluted with Teflon, devastating floods caused by deforestation and crushing poverty as the profits flow through Wall Street to international concerns. We pity the people trapped in these circumstances, pay our taxes to help fund mitigation, send money and supplies to charity when called and mostly watch in horror as our state elects legislators and administrators dedicated to unwinding any possible protections against the loss of human and natural habitat.

Now that we have our wake-up call, we are now learning how hard it is to stop the entropic forces of industrialization that transform clean water, fresh air and rich soil into consumable goods and capital reserves.

The Shale Gas Connection

Twenty years ago, an extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") turned West Virginia into our own local Saudi Arabia by opening up about 100 trillion cubic feet of natural gas for recovery, which is believed to be the largest volume in the United States. Around the same time, the baseload on the US electrical grid was dropping as manufacturing moved overseas, reducing the demand for West Virginia coal and natural gas.

While much of the world invested in the transition to information age industries and smarter infrastructure that leveraged renewable energy, energy efficiency and clean technologies, our local economic development officials and gas company were taking advantage of the natural gas boom in our backyard to attract the forms of heavy industry that demand power-dense energy sources. In September of 2016, a group of citizens called the Eastern Panhandle Protectors was formed to stop the development of a Mountaineer Gas pipeline between Berkeley Springs, in Morgan County, and Martinsburg, in Berkeley County. The trajectory of that pipeline would lead to an eventual terminus at Jefferson Orchards.

Yesterday evening Tracy Cannon, an organizer with Eastern Panhandle Protectors, addressed an audience at the Town Run Brewery in Shepherdstown. She began by reporting on the situation in Morgan and Berkeley Counties where the gas pipeline is currently under construction. Landowners have been sued for eminent domain, while others have relented under threat. Forests and farms have been stripped. Trees have been felled and ground into sawdust. Sixty-foot sections of pipeline are being trucked through narrow, winding roads. Relations between property owners are becoming tense, as neighbors discover that some received more for signing right-of-way agreements than others.

While this first section of pipeline, including a section being built by Transcanada under the Potomac River, was permitted by the Public Service Commission (PSC) in the fall of 2016, the last leg of the pipeline has not yet been approved. The endpoints were originally proposed for three towns in Jefferson County, Charles Town, Middleway and Shepherdstown, which would have suggested residential consumption.

The proposed endpoint recently changed. Mountaineer Gas stated in their filing to the PSC last month that the pipeline would stop, for now, at the Jefferson Orchards site of the planned Rockwool plant.

If it goes into operation, the 400,000 square foot facility on an old apple orchard would melt basalt rock and steel slag into a liquid and spin it like cotton candy into fluffy insulating material. Rock doesn't melt under normal conditions. The processes to heat the furnace and turn rocks into liquid will require an enormous amount of coal and gas.

So it's now become clear, after years of stonewalling and secrecy, the purpose of the pipeline that winds from Pennsylvania across Maryland to Jefferson County, WV is to provide gas for those furnaces. Unlike residential customers, who consume more in the winter and less in the summer, Rockwool would burn hot and heavy 24/7/365.

While the gas company would have you believe that the pipeline is a done deal, and the manufacturer is presenting the factory as unstoppable, the PSC has to approve the final leg of the pipeline. The Jefferson County Commission has requested the PSC to hold their hearing on the gas lines in Jefferson County instead of Charleston. If that happens, it's more likely that our voices will be heard.

On the surface, the PSC appears to have two competing directives. The PSC seeks an increase in business investment, job creation and retention and the state’s overall competitiveness. On the other hand, the PSC works to improve the standard of living and quality of life for the people of West Virginia. 

In reality, these are complementary goals. If a pipeline is brought in to serve heavy industry, more will be attracted, leading to the eventual destruction of our bucolic haven and the collapse of our natural, social and economic capital base.

Indigenous Economic Development

In 2005, I worked for then-Governor Joe Manchin as Director of Technology and Transformation in the West Virginia Development Office. My job was to attract technology-based businesses to the state and to encourage entrepreneurship.

In trying to bring a high-capacity fiber-to-the-home carrier to serve West Virginia, we went up against Verizon. Verizon was counting on the pennies a minute from their rural copper phone lines to pay for the fiber being laid in the NFL cities across the country. My short-lived career in the state capital culminated with the President of Verizon West Virginia poking me in the chest, his face a few inches from mine, stating that "the devil is in the details, and you're the devil."

Verizon was successful in keeping out competition and a few years later they sold the phone network to Frontier. We still have some of the worst telecommunications infrastructure in the United States.

In the process, I learned that most public officials, from the Jefferson County Development Authority to the County Councils, town councils and state governments, are well-meaning creatures of inertia. It's not their job to create or manifest a positive vision of life in the jurisdictions they serve.

The way we aggregate and distribute the $185 trillion in the global capital markets is a massive force that drives the character of our communities. Our small towns and main streets suffered from waves of change including fast food, big-box retailers and, particularly in West Virginia, pharmaceutical opioids. Capital market investors demand growth, and growth happens. Unfortunately, those same investors, through 401Ks, mutual funds and pension funds, are directing the transformation of their communities.

While it is important for us in Jefferson County to stop this particular development, the sea change will happen as people start taking more control over their capital. With massive funds like BlackRock only investing in companies and projects with positive social impact, with governments divesting from fossil fuels, with the roll-out of JOBS Act programs, such as the SEC's Regulation Crowdfunding rules, and with the decentralization of capital through security token offerings on the blockchain, it is possible that people will gain direct control of their local and global economies for the first time in the history of our civilization.

And not a moment too soon.