![]() Morales believes a complete societal transformation is necessary, but in the meantime, he’s going to fight to keep his community safe. “They're not taking climate change seriously. “They know the damage that it does, but they don't care,” he says of the natural gas industry. Morales, an electrician and long-standing member of his local union, finds it maddening that companies continue to develop new fossil fuel projects while the potential of renewables, especially in solar-friendly Puerto Rico, continues to go underrealized. “We’ve got to make people aware of what's coming their way.” “We just have to keep pushing,” she says. Corola says that most people don’t grasp just how big of a fireball a jackknifed LNG truck on nearby Interstate 295 (one likely route for highway transport) would ignite. We're asking for something that we need to protect neighborhoods, protect the schools.”Ĭorola persists because she sees getting Governor Phil Murphy on board as critical to the fight, but she still worries that it’ll take a disaster for people to truly understand LNG’s dangers and to prompt them to do something about it. ![]() We're not asking them to sign a resolution against street vendors or something. In her hometown of Haddonfield, however, Corola has run into some resistance, with council members saying that they can’t go around signing resolutions for everything that comes down the pike. “Resolutions, of course, have no legal teeth, but at least they’re something we can show the governor and say, ‘Hey, squash this thing,’ you know?” Like others in this fight, she’s been working on getting mayors and town council members to pass resolutions opposing the project. Disturbing the ground here could release these carcinogens into local ecosystems, soils, and the river.įearing for their immediate safety, residents along the project’s proposed paths in Pennsylvania and New Jersey are fighting the dangerous project and the myriad other issues the project would exacerbate, including environmental injustice, fracking, PCB pollution, and climate change. To boot, the site for the terminal at Gibbstown is the former DuPont Repauno Works plant, one of the largest PCB contamination sites on the Delaware River. The fuel also emits climate-destroying methane at every step of its production process, including during transportation. In comments submitted to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration in 2020, a coalition of environmental groups estimated that just 22 train tank cars filled with LNG hold the same amount of energy as the Hiroshima bomb. ![]() Although a recent court settlement put the development of the Wyalusing plant on hold for at least several months, advocates are not letting up.īut one thing remains clear: LNG-filled trucks and trains pose unreasonable risks to communities. The project by developer New Fortress Energy proposes to build a plant to liquefy fracked gas in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania, before shipping it nearly 200 miles to a deepwater port in Gibbstown, New Jersey, where the LNG would then depart for Ireland, Puerto Rico, and other overseas locations. fossil fuel industry is currently pushing to fast-track under the guise of “ energy independence,” in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine. This is just the type of infrastructure that the U.S. “It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.” Ong sees the terminal as a way for companies to test the viability of expanding LNG facilities on the East Coast. “Rather than create an actual pipeline that we know how to fight and we know how to regulate, they created this horrendous series of shipments by truck and rail,” says NRDC senior attorney Kimberly Ong, who directs the Northeast Fossil Free team. LNG has a history of large explosions on roadways (including a 2020 crash in eastern China that killed 19 people and injured more than 170), but the fuel has never before traveled en masse by rail. The plot is quiet at the moment, but if plans move forward to construct a terminal here to export liquefied natural gas (LNG), more than 1,650 trucks and two 100-car trains carrying this highly explosive fuel could pass through the area every day. The project to construct an LNG terminal in Gibbstown could still move forward, however, unless the DOT suspends the federal LNG-by-rail rule issued during the Trump administration.Īcross the Delaware River from the Philadelphia International Airport sits roughly 300 acres of empty but heavily polluted land. Department of Transportation (DOT) denied the renewal of a permit for Energy Transfer Solutions, a subsidiary of New Fortress Energy, to transport LNG by rail from Wyalusing, Pennsylvania, to Gibbstown, New Jersey.
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