The State Corporation Commission this week gave Virginia Natural Gas the green light to build a facility in Chesapeake that will maintain the pressure and flow of natural gas.
Regulators said the proposed compressor station is needed to reliably serve customers in case of emergency.
The project faced strong opposition from environmental groups and several historically Black neighborhoods surrounding the site, such as Crestwood and Eva Gardens.
“This decision disregards the voices of hundreds of Chesapeake residents who have spent years saying no to pollution,” Michelle Ueltschi, a local organizer with the nonprofit Chesapeake Climate Action Network, said in a statement Friday.
Virginia Natural Gas plans to build the $90 million station at an existing company site along South Military Highway and Bainbridge Boulevard. It sits at the intersection of two interstate pipelines, including a section built in 2017 called the Southside Connector Project.
The new project is expected to increase the average household’s monthly gas bill by about $2.
“This investment helps ensure customers have safer, more dependable service they can count on every day,” Virginia Natural Gas CEO Shannon Pierce said in a statement applauding the decision this week.
“We are grateful for the work our teams have done in partnership with regulators, community members and stakeholders to develop a project that aligns with our commitment to environmental stewardship and community engagement.”
Ken Yagelski, the company’s gas supply director, previously told WHRO the compressor station is necessary to accommodate rising energy demand, including several thousand more customers each year.
“Every new installation adds more demand on the system, which draws down the pressure in the pipe,” he said. “There’s not a new level of reliability being called for. It's just that the demand for energy in Hampton Roads continues to grow.”
He said the station would likely run about 20 days each year — the coldest days — similar to “peaker plants” proposed by Dominion Energy to produce natural gas.
Chesapeake’s will be the first compressor station in Hampton Roads, with the closest in Charles City County.
Virginia Natural Gas uses a “hub and spoke” model to distribute gas, Yagelski said. The proposed site is a hub. Building it elsewhere would require building new pipelines to connect.
He said many of the health concerns raised are based on compressor stations that use combustion engines, which can release harmful pollutants. The Chesapeake station would use electric motors, limiting noise and emissions of greenhouse gases such as methane, he said.
But residents argued that even a small amount of added pollution or industrial noise would be too much, because the lower-income area is already exposed to existing gas and electrical infrastructure.
The area “has carried more than its fair share of environmental burdens for generations,” Rodney Nickens, Jr., a Chesapeake resident who unsuccessfully ran in the latest House of Delegates election, told the SCC at a public hearing in August. “Siting this facility here continues a pattern of environmental injustice targeting working class, Black and brown communities.”
A month after the hearing, commission staff released a report echoing some concerns raised by the project’s opponents.
SCC staff conducted their own environmental justice analysis, looking at whether the project could disproportionately impact communities with lower income and majority-minority populations.
They found that within a 5-mile radius of the site, about 74 census block groups — small geographic units used by the U.S. Census Bureau — are defined as low-income. About 111 are identified as communities of color. There are two coal ash sites and 15 federal Superfund sites located within the area.
The company’s and SCC’s assessments “demonstrate that the project may potentially negatively impact several EJ communities,” staff wrote. “The Commission may determine that approval of the proposed project is not reasonable at this time, given the number of EJ communities and the identified existing pollution sites.”
The report found that the project would likely mitigate risks of service loss and avoid costs associated with restoring such service — however, restoring service after a single event would be less expensive than the total project cost of $90 million.
The only guaranteed need for the project would be to provide uninterrupted service to Smurfit Westrock, a paper mill in West Point, the report stated.
Smurfit plans to pay for about 10% of the project under an agreement that ensures a portion of the company’s natural gas demand cannot be interrupted.
In their decision this week, state commissioners said they found the company appropriately considered the project’s environmental justice factors as required by law and is minimizing potential impacts.
“Specifically, the use of electric compressors that will not emit carbon dioxide is a design choice that demonstrates an awareness of, and a sensitivity to, environmental justice and fenceline communities,” regulators wrote.
Chesapeake’s City Council originally voted against rezoning land from residential and business to light industrial purposes for the compressor station last June, but reversed course a month later.
Council members approved the request 6-3, along racial and political party lines, angering residents who said they were not allowed to speak at the meeting.
