ENERGY COMPANY PLOTTED GAS PLANT IN SMALL PENNSYLVANIA TOWN — BUT NO ONE TOLD RESIDENTS – The Intercept, July 2023

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE:

https://theintercept.com/2023/07/17/chester-pennsylvania-liquefied-natural-gas/

“WHEN ZULENE MAYFIELD received a call from a reporter last summer, she was surprised. A journalist working at Philadelphia’s public radio station had contacted her for a story about a plan to develop a liquefied natural gas facility in her hometown of Chester, Pennsylvania, a city that sits along the Delaware River just southwest of the Philadelphia International Airport.

Since 1992, Mayfield has led an environmental justice group called Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living. She formed the group to address local concerns about the concentration of waste disposal facilities throughout the city, most notably incineration and waste treatment plants. Chester is home to one of the country’s biggest incinerators, a waste-to-energy facility owned by the Covanta corporation, which burns trash from up and down the East Coast.

The facilities, Mayfield said, were sickening residents in Chester, an overwhelmingly Black and low-income community. Over the years, Mayfield helped lead several campaigns to stop new incineration and waste treatment plants from setting up shop in Chester. So she was disturbed when she learned about a proposal for a new $6.4 billion liquefied natural gas, or LNG, facility in her backyard. Mayfield, who is deeply enmeshed in the community’s environmental health scene, had heard nothing about it until her group received a press inquiry.

“We learned about it last year by way of a reporter calling us up for a quote,” Mayfield told The Intercept. “It had not even been on our radar. We knew nothing about it, even though they had been secretly moving around in the city and throughout the state trying to get political support to bring it here.” 

An energy company called Penn America had been shopping the plan around to local and state officials for years with no notice to the community, WHYY reported last June. The LNG facility, which would pipe in natural gas, then liquify it for export, seemed to have already attracted bipartisan buy-in.”

Photos: Emily Whitney for The Intercept