When a project that “would’ve been the largest fossil gas pipeline to ever come out of Appalachia” is proposed in your backyard, and you’re a freelance writer specializing in science, climate change and environmental topics, it’s time to dig in.
Jonathan Mingle grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, and first heard about Dominion Energy’s proposed pipeline in 2019, about five years after it was first introduced. His new book, “Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future,” tells two distinct but intertwined stories. One is about the people who fought for years to block the project. The other is the gas industry’s long history of trying to pass off methane as a “bridge fuel” between coal and cleaner energy.
Dominion “is a monopoly power utility for two-thirds of Virginia. Back then (in 2014), it owned all kinds of energy businesses, gas utilities in different states, power utilities. Dominion owned natural gas storage facilities. They built a liquified natural gas terminal in Maryland,” he says.
In 2013, there was a national “frenzy” to build pipelines to pull natural gas deposits out of the Marcellus Shale reserves in Pennsylvania and Maryland through the process of hydrofracking, promising to be a boon to industry and residents who were told of tax credits and lower utility bills.
Dominion partnered with Duke Energy, based in North Carolina, for the project. “It was going to be a 600 miles long, 42 inches in diameter pipeline that would cross the Allegheny highlands of West Virginia, super steep terrain, cut through two national forests, cross the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, bore a mile-long hole through the Blue Ridge Mountains, under the Blue Ridge Parkway, under the Appalachian Trail, then tunnel under the James River and onward to the sea coast where Dominion claimed there was rising demand for gas in areas like Hampton Roads, Virginia, and eastern North Carolina,” Mingle says. “That was what they wanted to build. My book tells the story of the fierce grassroots resistance to this project in a particular stretch of Virginia. Of those 600 miles, my book really focuses on what happened from Charlottesville west to the border with West Virginia, these rural counties, mountainous counties, really tenacious opposition to this project.”
Initially, Mingle didn’t set out to write a book. But the pandemic changed things, as did a fellowship with the Alicia Patterson Foundation, offering him a year of reporting focused on natural gas and the transition to cleaner energy.
“I started thinking about the pipeline again. Suddenly it was canceled. After six years of struggle and legal challenges and the costs doubling for Dominion and Duke, on a sleepy Sunday, July 4th weekend 2020, they announced they were going to cancel it, which shocked everyone who had been fighting it,” he says. “Dominion had just won a Supreme Court case on the pipeline and suddenly they’re walking away from it. It became a story of these folks who had fought this project really hard doing something unprecedented. There isn’t another case that either they or I’ve been able to find of a successful citizen effort to kill one of these large interstate gas pipelines. In this case, it really was a story of something that doesn’t happen very often.”
Jonathan Mingle is a freelance journalist and the author of a new book, “Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future,” which documents how Virginia communities pushed back against Dominion Power’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline Project.
