“Never mind, we’re not going to do it. It turns out we made some big mistakes in our engineering. Sorry about that,” Dominion Energy didn’t say four years ago when they announced the cancelation of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
Instead, their press release said the shutdown was "due to ongoing delays and increasing cost uncertainty which threaten the economic viability of the project."
Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America's Energy Future.
by Jonathan Mingle
Island Press
Hardcover. $25.93 on Amazon
“Who killed the Atlantic Coast Pipeline? It depends on who you ask,” the book Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future says on page 243. One reading from what’s presented is that the ACP would have never worked; it was dead from the get-go. The utility was likely lucky to get out when it did.
Jonathan Mingle’s 339-page book is divided into four parts and 12 chapters, has an eight-page index and 593 footnotes, with a prologue, epilogue, and acknowledgments.
The author’s acknowledgments at the end of the book start with, “‘Everybody thinks the fight against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline began around their kitchen table,’ Rick Webb told me with a laugh. It’s funny because it’s true. And they are right: across Virginia’s mountains, citizens made parallel, nearly simultaneous decisions to organize and oppose the project.”
The book, the author says, is about people working together to change things. Among the people involved were dozens of bureaucrats, both villains and heroes.
Gaslight attempts to tell a David and Goliath story by contrasting the individuals and small groups in the countryside who were threatened by the ACP with the giant utilities and powerful government policymakers who wanted to build the 600-mile pipeline.
This might be why Mingle ignored Wintergreen’s fight against the ACP and focused on the tenacious Nelson County all-volunteer groups, especially Friends of Nelson, that wouldn’t stop asking questions and individuals such as Wintergreen’s neighbor innkeeper Will Fenton, who lived at ground zero of the project.*
With detailed reporting, Gaslight illuminates how the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) failed in its job and, perhaps never reported in such detail before, how the professionals in the USDA’s Forest Service office in Elkins, West Virginia, succeeded.
While it took years, the careful and detailed technical analysis directed by Clyde Thompson, the U.S. Forest Service’s supervisor of Monongahela National Forest, and Kent Karriker, who reported to Thompson, killed the ACP.
Thompson and Karriker might argue that it was not them but the laws of Mother Nature that said no to the ACP. As the book explains:
“The elephant in the room throughout all of this is that you’re going to do this really serious earth-disturbing construction going straight up the side of the mountain,” Karriker said. “Gravity and water are uncompromising forces. There is not much way to get across the central Appalachian West too easily without encountering those kinds of problems.”…
“Some of these are so steep they are hard to stand on,” Thompson told me, “You start digging in them and you hit a seep of water that works like lubricant on soil. You start thinking, ‘How do you hold it? How do you keep it on the ground?’”
(The book notes Friends of Nelson and Wintergreen hired different independent specialists, both of whom came to the same conclusions as Thomspon and Karriker. “The risk of failure is high,” Mervin Bartholomew, Wintergreen’s expert, said flatly.)
The book details how the Forest Service’s Thompson came under severe political pressure to ignore what he and others saw as obvious facts. ACP engineers attempted to gaslight them, Mingle says, only offering that the contractors had solutions coming that were “Best in Class” when asked for design details. Thomspon and Karriker's superiors eventually overruled them, and the ACP got its permit in 2018.
It was then that the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) moved into high gear for its clients, using the conclusions Thompson and Karriker had made that SELC discovered using Freedom of Information requests.
With the facts SELC presented, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Roger Gregory couldn’t square how the U.S. Forest Service “had spent so long telling ACP that it hadn’t proved it could safely build across steep mountain terrain, only to suddenly abandon its demands in July 2017.” The rulings that came down from the court went against the ACP.
That was the beginning of the end, but no one recognized it at the time. When the project was canceled months later, the opponents were shocked. Now years later, this new book fails to fully grasp the scope of the technological absurdity of the ACP but comes closer than anyone else has.
The Southern Environmental Law Center gives itself a lot of credit for stopping the ACP, and deservedly so. Dominion has no one to blame but itself.
“It’s hard to overestimate what a significant and persistent factor that arrogant route choice was at every turn,” DJ Gerkin, SELC’s Program Director and one of the lead attorneys on the ACP project, told the author of Gaslight. Gerkin claims the pipeline’s case was further damaged by the Trump administration's inept “firing, demoting, or shifting aside anyone at the agencies who looked at the facts.”
The lawyers say, “The process worked,” but if the process had worked as it should have, the ACP would not have gotten as far as it did. With the help of the courts and the solid work of Clyde Thompson and his staff, the citizens and their lawyers held the government accountable for the facts. Dominion should be thankful; Mother Nature would have eventually had the final say, no matter the economics.
The book is well-written but not what anyone would call an “entertaining read.” There are too many characters and too many digressions in telling the complex story. It’s not a complete picture; those looking for a detailed discussion of the other serious issues ACP brought forward, such as the abuse of eminent domain by private enterprise, might be a little disappointed.
The author works in too much of his advocacy for “the fight for America’s energy future,” as the subtitle says. (Mingle makes it clear he is none too keen on natural gas.) That said, Gaslight is a first-rate piece of journalism that tells a worthwhile story that will be of interest to many here who suffered the absurd threat of the ACP first-hand. –Charles Batchelor
* While the construction would have been a huge hassle for almost every property owner involved along the 600-mile ACP, the experience for Fenton Inn and Wintergreen mountain would have been extraordinary. For one, the horizontal directional drilling on Route 664 under the inn and at Wintergreen’s mountain entryway to create a tunnel for the ACP underneath the Blue Ridge Parkway and Appalachian Trail would have gone on for 24 hours a day for a year. “I’m not going to pretend it’s not going to be messy and disruptive for the people at Wintergreen. It's going to be uncomfortable. You're going to know we are there. It's not going to be subtle,” Ron Baker, Virginia ACP project manager, told the resort community on May 1, 2018.
