Early last year, I started hearing from some activists in Massachusetts about a natural gas project proposed in their town. One woman in particular really thought this was something I should look into. Her name is Andrea Honore.
But it took me a good year to understand what was going on. I never heard of a compressor. I'd never heard of ferk. I didn't understand the process.
Andrea lives in the town of Weymouth, Massachusetts. It's a coastal town of around fifty thousand people in the South Shore region, about half an hour south of Boston, and in twenty fifteen, Spectra Energy, a gas company from Texas, wanted to put what's called a natural gas compressor right on the water at the north end of town. Natural gas needs a little help to travel the whole length of a pipeline, and compressor stations helped to sort of
goose the gas along the way. If you've never heard of these things, it's probably because they usually don't put them in the middle of cities or even heavily populated areas period They're generally placed kind of on the middle of nowhere because they explode, sometimes.
Also breaking overnight.
In Green County, an explosion at a compressor station in Sycamore had firefighters busy battling flames on Hopkins Run Road.
We're continuing coverage tonight on an explosion that took place earlier today. According to the Monahan's Volunteer Fire Department, one person has died and two others have been flown out with burn injuries.
Coverage on Witness Needs five.
The ten starts right.
Now, like breaking a ten.
A gas line rupture leads to a big fire and explosion in Logan County.
Now we're joined by the Guthrie Fire Chief, Eric Carlow, who is on the scene. There, a chief, what happened out there? Exactly?
Well, guys, it we had an explosion at a gas compressure plant.
But Spectra wanted to put the Weymouth compressor in a very populated area right at the foot of a heavily trafficked bridge. Here's Honoree again.
But at the time, Spectra Energy offered my little town forty seven million dollars to drop official opposition. That's a lot of money.
She had become somewhat known in the community as an advocate for school funding, so when she raised some concerns to the mayor about taking that money. He was surprised, but he.
Called and he's like, well, what didn't the schools, you know, your school advocate. Wouldn't it be really great to have that money for the schools? And I'm like, well, yeah, if you want to be a one term mayor, go ahead take the money. Like that's not this is absolutely not no, there's no amount of money there would So, you know, he eventually asked around, did his thing. People
started calling up his ass. It got made more public, you know, protests and that, and so he was like, Nope, we're not going to take the money.
By that point, Honore had learned about the potential impacts of the compressor from a local group called Four River Residents Against Compressor Station or FRAS for short. One of the criticisms of the station is that it would be sited at the foot of the four River Bridge. Like I said, that's a major commuter bridge, so an explosion there, depending on the time of day, could do some serious damage. Alice Arena is the president of FRACS.
I kind of hooked into it a little bit, and I thought, oh, hell no, how could they put something like this on this little tiny piece of land. So close to this brand new bridge, so close to a sewage pumping station. I mean, it just was madness and it made no sense.
A lot of people thought that way, and opposition to the project started to grow over twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen. Patrick O'Connor is from Wemouth. Today he's a state senator, but six years ago he was a city council president in Weymouth.
You know, this is going to be in a large population center, the gateway really to two major cities in the Conwealth of Massachusetts, Quinsy and Weymouth, and it's going to be located next to a brand new bridge that, through the state and federal government, we spent over three hundred million dollars on. So you know, tens of thousands of commuters travel by this compressor station every single day, so it's not it's not the typical location for one
of these compressor stations. That's one of that was one of the major things that we first sort of looked at and thought, this is unusual to be placed in an area where there's so much activity, both residential and commercial.
That was the real catalyst to fight it, and then from there in the research that we've done, and in talking with other communities and other stakeholders, you know, we've identified a whole host of other things that are wrong with these compressor stations and why they shouldn't be in areas where people are, you know, regularly congregating.
One thing O'Connor learned about was a process called a blowdown that happens at compressor stations.
So they're basically using thousands of chemicals now to extract from the shale this natural gas, and as it's going through these compressor stations, one of the other components is that it's speeding this gas up, and it's taking some of those byproducts out of that gas, and then those byproducts are captured at the station and then every so often, you know, they were saying monthly or quarterly, but realistically, when you read their filings, it happens about two or
three times a week. They'll take all that byproduct and release it into the atmosphere.
That seems like a potential problem for a lot of reasons, but it also has a big immediate negative side effect for people living nearby.
It stinks, they said, it smells like, you know, rotten eggs.
Last fall, it seemed like this six year fight was over the compressor and the pipelines that connects to are owned by Canadian energy giant en Bridge. Now they're the same folks that own the Line three pipeline you're hearing a lot about in Minnesota. The Waymouth project got its final permits in twenty nineteen, started construction, and in September twenty twenty was ready to start operating. Normally, that's where
this story would end. Maybe the activists would launch a lawsuit, but it would be an upheld battle and it would probably take years. That's not what happened here, at least not yet. There was an election in January, you may remember, and that meant a changeup at the federal regulatory Commission that governs projects like this, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FURK. If you listen to this podcast or you know me in real life, you know I love to
nerd out on a good FURK story. Generally I try not to bore other people with them. But buckle up, because today we're going to enjoy the rarest of things, a truly dramatic FURK story, and it could have huge implications, not just for the folks in Weymouth, but for other people living near natural gas infrastructure, and for this country's progress on climate action in general, all that coming up right after this quick break. I'm Ami Westervelt, and this
is drilled. Activists like Andrea and Alice have been trying to get national reporters to pay attention to what's happening in Weymouth for years, and so has Miriam Wasser, an environmental reporter with WBR Boston's and PR news station. Last month something happened that made people outside of Massachusetts sit up and take notice.
It is now suddenly like this big issue that gas companies all over the country are paying attention to. And one person I talked to just had this great line where he was like, Miriam, this is the Weymouth compressor's decoda access pipeline moment.
That might be a stretch, but who knows. Here's what's been happening in Weymouth since last fall. So, like I mentioned before the break, despite a lot of pushback for years from local activist groups, the compressor station got its permits and started operating in September, and then almost immediately.
They had an emergency shut down. Turns out this overing gasket failed and it wasn't supposed to be used in this situation. But anyways, workers had to manually shut down part of the facility, and in the process they vented a lot of natural gas into the area.
People were pretty freaked out, especially the people who had been worried about this project from the beginning. And Bridge said, everything's fine. The emergency system worked like it should. We fixed a small maintenance issue, and we're back in business. Two weeks after that shutdown, FIRK says, okay, you're good to go. Here's your final final permit. Now keep in mind this is still the Trump administration's FIRK, which was
extremely pro oil and gas. The head of the Commission at the time was Neil Chatterjee, Mitch McConnell's energy advisor.
And then six days later, the Waymouth compressor has a second emergency shutdown. This time it's I there was some sort of loss of power to the emergency shutdown system and it basically, I mean, it did what it's supposed to do, right. It lost power, it triggered itself to shut down, but again vented a lot of natural gas into the area. And people were so alarmed and a number of our congressional delegates were really alarmed, and they reached out to the federal government.
That triggered an investigation from the federal government, specifically from the Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration or PIMZA. The investigation kicked off in October, effectively pausing all activity at the Weymouth compressor and activist groups and local legislators took that opportunity to appeal to Ferk to say, hey, this is what we said was going to happen. Now it's happened. You need to rethink this. Here's State Senator Patrick O'Connor again.
It was almost an immediate emergency shut down, and then right after that there was another one when they started to get up and running again. And no one could have made a better case for why that compressor station shouldn't be there than the company themselves by having those malfunctions happen.
I should mention that O'Connor is a Republican and this is something that I see over and over again that when it comes to national discussions in DC, a lot of times debates around natural gas and oil and other kinds of fossil fuels are kind of in the abstract. At the local level, these things are not partisan. When there is a pipeline or a compressor station in your district causing potential harm to your constituents, all of a sudden, it seems very clear that it's something that you might
want to do something about. And O'Connor is very frank about what he thinks FERK should be doing in situations like this, you know.
Seeing regulatory commissions that have all this authority and power make decisions based on what the industry wants them to do. That practice as a whole, whether it's in healthcare or energy, or education or wherever it is, just has to end. And it's been going on for far too long down
in DC. So yes, I would hope that not just FORK, you know, but other agencies see that people are paying attention more than they have ever been paying attention to what's going on down in our federal government, and that we need to actually look out for our taxpayers, look out for our neighbors, and you know, not just rubber stamp these projects and these initiatives that big, big corporations put forward.
Okay, So the Weymouth compressor was temporarily paused in October there was this federal investigation going on. Legislators and activists were appealing to Furk, and then Firk did something kind of weird. They initially declined to rehear the arguments about the Weymouth compressor, but they didn't completely shut the idea of a rehearing down. Oh Furk, you inscrutable beast. Here's Alice arena with fracks.
They had to either give us the rehearing or they had to deny it. They didn't have a choice, so they denied it on November twenty third, but said, but you know, maybe we'll think about this later. So it was it was a non denial denial. It was kind of crazy in December. At the commission meeting on December seventeenth. I believe we were on the docket on the agenda for this meeting, and we're like, we don't even know what it is that they're talking about, but they were talking about the denial.
Apparently at the December meeting they decided to table the denial discussion until January.
So at the January meeting on January eighteenth, three of the commissioners Chatter, Gye, Glick and Clements voted to deny the denial double negative, and so we said, well, gosh, that's wonderful. You denied the denial, but you didn't give us the rehearing. So what can we do. So Frank started a campaign with our allies, you know, across the state and our members, the state delegation and our federal delegation, and we went after Frock on the dock and said,
you have to give us the rehearing. You can't. You know, you've got to either deny it or or approve it, one or the other.
Now by this point, Biden has been inaugurated and a guy named Richard Glick has been appointed the FURK Commissioner. And this seems like a big deal to climate activists because Glick has been very outspoken about the fact that he thinks FERK ought to be considering environmental justice and climate impacts when they evaluate things like pipelines and compressor stations.
What was like super surprising is after this meeting, Commissioner Richard Glick got on Twitter and he said, quote, the Weymouth Compressor Station raises serious environmental justice questions which we need to examine. The communities surrounding the project are regularly subjected to high levels of pollution and residents are concerned emissions from the station will make things worse. In three years at FIRK, i've seen little more than lip service
paid to environmental justice. This needs to change, and that I'm sure, as you know, Amy is like an astounding thing to hear from someone within FIRK.
It really is.
That was Wbuur's Miriam laws her again and she's right. In twenty years reporting on energy and climate change, I have never heard a FIRK commissioner say something like this, let alone put it in writing in public. And then came another big surprise at the FIRK meeting in February. Here's Alice Arena again.
So in February, on February eighteenth, at that meeting, they opened up another subdocket where they issued an order for paper briefing on the compressor station. And this order for paper briefing kind of says, did we do something wrong? Did we consider environmental justice? Did we consider safety under the Natural Gas Act? And what has changed? So? What
has changed since the certificate is in September? And as far as we're concerned, what has changed since they issued the original certificate back in twenty seventeen, and so going back to twenty seventeen, we've got lots of things that have changed climate, you know, the acceleration of climate change going above and beyond when anyone expected. So we've got that going for us. And also necessity, the gas is worthless.
The domestic need has gone down, the international need has gone down, and so why are you even doing this? So that's where we are right now. We are in this briefing period and the briefs are due technically April fourth, but that's a Sunday, so we're saying April second.
The industry is of course also filing briefs and not just Mbridge, every large gas company and trade group. As if Ferk decides to rethink this permit, it might just rethink others. Here's State Senator O'Connor again.
Oh, they're all in. When you look at the wee an email every time that somebody files, and when you look at who's filing, it's all the big players, you know, the ones that don't even have a financial interest in what's going on in North Weymouth because they know that this is a real showdown. Ferk is asking some real legitimate questions about the operational practices, the public health components, and of a lot of other the demand and need for natural gas, especially in this region.
Adam Carlesco with Food and Water Watch brought a lawsuit against FERK last year for failing to consider impacts like the ones people are concerned about in Weymouth. We covered that case if you want to go back and listen. I was curious for his take as someone who's been frustrated with FERK and gone up against them in court over their reputation for rubberstone projects.
They're willing to open up a docket and look at issues that might have been overlooked under a regulatory captured FERK under Trump and a lot of the folks that were working with in the agency at that time. And so that shows me that there's a little bit of willingness to listen to public outcry and kind of correct mistakes that might have been there and you know, some oversight issues that they might have had.
And even if it doesn't, the Commission is signaling in a pretty big way that it plans to look more closely at projects like these. But Carlasco says he's still waiting to see real action from FERK, not just speeches and tweets.
I'm not necessarily holding my breath on anything, because while there's a lot of lip service coming out of the Commission on the whole, I'm not necessarily, i guess, overly optimistic about some of the approaches that they're taking so far. They're still issuing certificate orders are wholly deficient. They issued one on a project that's running through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York that is wholly disregarding any sort of
indirect impacts, specifically downstream combustion. This is supposed to go into the New York City metro area, and they completely fail to look at how this would impact compliance with New York's climate policy laws. And they're not looking at how it might incentivize for the drilling within the Marcella's shale, despite it coming directly from the Marcella's shale. So they're wholly ignoring a lot of the issues that are and play here.
In June, Neil Chatterjee, the former head of FIRK and still a commissioner, will leave his seat and Biden will appoint another commissioner, so the FIRK that makes a final decision on the Waymouth compressor will be very different than the one that approved it, replies to the briefs that are being prepared now will be doing early May, and then Ferk needs time to read through it all and discuss it, so it's unlikely there will be a decision
until June or July. In the meantime, Alice Arena is enjoying an unfamiliar sensation optimism.
When it all started to happen, We're just standing there with our hands up in the air, going what the heck is going on here? It's like we're so used to just being beaten on the head by Fark and by all of the agencies that all of a sudden we're sitting in the sand.
What that's it for this time? Thanks for listening. We'll be sure to update you on this project as there's news, and don't forget we'll be back soon with a new narrative season on the natural gas industry in general. So make sure you're subscribed so you won't miss that. Big thank you to our latest Patreon subscriber. They are Daniella Osiander, Jake Full and Fiona Writer. If you would like an ad free feed of the podcast plus bonus content. Go
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