{"id":1138590,"date":"2023-07-17T19:44:01","date_gmt":"2023-07-17T19:44:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/production.public.theintercept.cloud\/?p=436131"},"modified":"2023-07-17T19:44:01","modified_gmt":"2023-07-17T19:44:01","slug":"energy-company-plotted-gas-plant-in-small-pennsylvania-town-but-no-one-told-residents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/07\/17\/energy-company-plotted-gas-plant-in-small-pennsylvania-town-but-no-one-told-residents\/","title":{"rendered":"Energy Company Plotted Gas Plant in Small Pennsylvania Town \u2014 But No One Told Residents"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
When Zulene Mayfield<\/u> received a call from a reporter last summer, she was surprised. A journalist working at Philadelphia\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s <\/a>biggest incinerators<\/a>, a waste-to-energy facility owned by the Covanta corporation, which burns trash from up and down the East Coast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s environmental health scene, had heard nothing about it until her group received a press inquiry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe learned about it last year by way of a reporter calling us up for a quote,\u201d Mayfield told The Intercept. \u201cIt 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.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a> last June. The LNG facility, which would pipe in natural gas, then liquify it for export, seemed to have already attracted bipartisan buy-in.<\/p>\n\n\n Democrats in Pennsylvania had promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but former Gov. Tom Wolf and members of his administration met with Penn America Energy to help shepherd its plans as early as 2016. Republican lawmakers, for their part, formed the Philadelphia LNG Export Task Force in November 2022 to study plans for the proposed facility. The task force is stacked with industry executives, including one from the American Petroleum Institute<\/a>, which launched<\/a> a global campaign to promote liquefied natural gas as \u201cclean\u201d energy in 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n