Person County residents alarmed by Dominion plan to build natural gas storage tanks

Residents of a rural part of Person County are worried about Dominion Energy’s plans to build a liquefied natural gas storage facility nearby.

Dominion is seeking a rezoning decision from Person County officials and an air permit from the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality that will allow it to build a storage tank that can hold up to 25 million gallons — or two billion cubic feet — of liquefied natural gas in Rougemont, about a half-hour north of Durham.

The so-called Moriah Energy Center is needed, Dominion officials say, to meet growing need in the Triangle, especially on cold winter days when demand is at its highest. But nearby residents worry that the large-scale project could change the complexion of their quiet rural community and have lingering questions about how it could impact the well water they all rely on.

Andrea and Paul Childers are among the residents who are most concerned about the project, which is less than a mile from their 10-acre property.

During a community meeting Dominion hosted Wednesday evening, Andrea pulled up her Instagram account to show off pictures of the monarch butterflies that visit and of the trees that sit behind the house where her family has lived for 31 years. She recounted how a few winters ago, a black bear sat near a bird feeder for months as the family kept updated on a wildlife camera.

“My biggest fear is that we literally are just going to say, ‘We’re done’ and leave. Because who’s going to buy that land?” Andrea Childers said.

Everyone in the surrounding area is on well water, and Paul Childers is especially concerned about what will happen to the aquifer if Dominion draws a planned 360,000 gallons of water to supply an emergency tank on site.

“Without well water, my house is worth nothing,” Paul Childers said.

Dominion’s liquefied natural gas project

Dominion is purchasing five parcels of land that total 485.7 acres for the project. The company is asking Person County to rezone all of those parcels from rural conservation or residential designations to general industrial but said in its zoning application that the project would focus on 70 acres near the center of its newly acquired land to allow for buffers.

When demand is low, gas would be piped to the facility where carbon dioxide and water would be removed before it is cooled to -260 degrees Fahrenheit, allowing Dominion to squeeze about 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas into each tank.

When demand spikes, Dominion could return as much as 200 million cubic feet of gas per day to customers from each tank.

“We have to build the infrastructure needed and the storage so that on the coldest day in winter, people can still heat their homes. This project is a part of that,” Persida Montanez, a Dominion spokeswoman, told The News & Observer.

To give a sense of scale, North Carolina’s natural gas use for everything other than electric power in 2022 totaled about 261 billion cubic feet of natural gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In December, when a severe winter storm caused the first rolling blackouts in the state’s history, the state used 37 billion cubic feet of natural gas for residential, industrial, commercial and vehicle fuel.

The Moriah Energy Center is solely being built to serve Dominion’s natural gas customers, Montanez said. It would not provide any gas to nearby Duke Energy powerplants that currently burn coal if they switch over to natural gas in the future.

Dominion picked the Rougemont site because it sits near an existing natural gas pipeline. That means Dominion officials don’t have to go through the permitting process of building another pipeline or cause the environmental impacts of doing so.

“We already have the pipeline system there that would bring the gas to this facility so we can store it without having to build more of that infrastructure,” Montanez said.

Dominion also owns a liquefied natural gas storage facility in Cary, which holds up to a billion cubic feet of gas. That’s half the size of the tank Dominion intends to build at the Person County facility and could ultimately be a fourth of the total facility size.

According to the company’s submission for a North Carolina air permit, once completed the facility would emit 94.9 tons of carbon monoxide annually, 35 tons of nitrogen oxides and 3.96 tons of hazardous air pollutants. It will also result in the equivalent of 65,579 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, or about as much as 14,200 gasoline-powered cars emit.

The company is planning to build the project in stages, with one tank going up first and market forces dictating when or if the second one is constructed. Both the zoning decision and air quality permit, however, cover the building of both tanks.

“If the market demand is there, that’s something we will consider at that time but right now that decision has not been made. But it’ll depend on the customer need,” Montanez said.

Construction on the first tank could begin as soon as mid-2024, according to Dominion’s permit application, with the tank ready for commercial use by the third quarter of 2026.

If the natural gas storage facility is built, Dominion projects that construction will bring about $1 million in tax revenue, while the property will result in about $800,000 in local taxes each year. It will support 300 construction jobs, with 12 full-time operators managing the plant once it is built.

“This is an excellent example of property owners and industry leaders working together in a progressive manner for the benefit of Person County,” Gordon Powell, chairman of the Person County Board of Commissioners, said in a statement announcing the project.

That statement was the first indication members of the public had that the project was being discussed.

Questioning local officials

Person County residents aren’t so sure that the project is benefiting them, and they are wary of building more gas infrastructure at a moment in time when many scientists are cautioning against using the fuel whose main component is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

“It seems to me that more and more people are advocating to move away from fossil fuel and at a time that that is happening, they’re building this plant,” Keith Lawrence, who lives in the Elderberry community, told The N&O.

In August 2021, the Person County Board of Commissioners voted against rezoning for a 920-acre solar farm, citing concerns about land use and bald eagles that live in the area. At the same time, the Roxboro Courier-Times reported, the commissioners passed a six-month moratorium on solar farms of 10 acres or greater.

Another concern is what could happen to the facility if the planned $3.1 billion sale of Dominion’s North Carolina natural gas assets to Canada-based Enbridge is completed.

“People just have lot of questions, and we’re not sure that the county has been completely open and honest,” Lawrence said.

Ideally, Andrea Childers said she would have liked to have seen environmental impact statements and feasibility studies explaining the facility’s impact and why the Rougemont site made the most sense. And she would have liked to have known about the plant and had input earlier in the process, before it was on commission schedules for potential approvals.

“I would have liked to have had a voice in this, but we were given no voice. This project, for all intents and purposes, it’s already done,” Childers said. “All of this is just icing. All of it’s just for show and no matter what we do or say, it’s happening.”

Person County’s Planning Board will consider the project at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Person County Office Building, 304 S. Morgan St., Roxboro. It will issue an advisory decision that will then head to the Person County Board of Commissioners for final approval or denial.

This story was produced with financial support from the Hartfield Foundation and 1Earth Fund, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.