Swann Compressor Station, or Food For a Million People?
This blog post was written by Kimberley Homer, a retired electrical engineer, beginning gardener and fairy tale writer who wishes she could live in an oak tree. She and her partner William and daughter Gwyneth are building a woodland gathering place in Elliston.
Local community members in a jam circle during a work day at the Eastmont Community Garden.
A few Saturdays ago, we had a work day at the Eastmont community garden in eastern Montgomery County, Virginia. It is a beautiful community, drawing people from the neighborhood – Elliston and Shawsville – of course, but also a group of Potomac High School students from McLean, in northern Virginia. The Potomac students have built benches and picnic tables for us, and that day, installed a fence and planted fruit trees for our orchard. These kids worked all day in the heat, digging, mulching, and watering. We had water in the tank that day, but when it’s empty, we haul jugs of water from the river. We are growing a lot of potatoes, which don’t need watering.
I recently calculated that an acre of potato plants can produce 10,000 pounds of potatoes without tractors or fertilizers – enough to feed five people for an entire year. We don’t have an acre, but last year, the garden gave us more than one ton of food in a place with no grocery store. Eastmont is known for its tomato festival, so we grow a lot of tomatoes, too, and beans and broccoli and okra. We often sing while we garden, because one of our favorite garden friends from Big Spring Drive knows a lot of songs, and on that work day, he brought his banjo and played with the other banjo players, guitar players, fiddle and mandolin and dulcimer players – he even played the washboard some. He was the first guest to arrive that day, and he brought a big bowl of potato salad and another big bowl of macaroni salad for the potluck. He says he’s not smart because he can’t read or drive, but he’s plenty smart, and he knows everyone in Eastmont.
Well, while we were setting up, a man drove up – the garden is right next to the food pantry and thrift store – and sort of staggered out of his car, and said, “Can anybody help me?” I walked over to see what he needed, and he said his wife had just died of breast cancer, he had lost his home and was living in his car, and hadn’t had anything to eat for three days. He said he had a job starting that night, but didn’t know how he would survive until payday. I said, “Well, please come sit down and have something to eat.” He said he didn’t have any money, and I said, “This is a community garden. Everybody eats.” I fixed him a plate of macaroni salad and some cornbread and gave him the little bit of cash I had. He said his job was at a manufacturing plant known to be good stewards of the energy and water they use. They are not drying up our rivers and aquifers or generating obscene amounts of heat.
The energy equivalent of those 10,000 pounds of potatoes, enough to feed five people for one year from just one acre, is about 4060 kilowatt hours. If it goes into service, the proposed Swann compressor station will use methane gas to fuel its 136,900 horsepower turbines, turbines that are at best 40% efficient. This means that 60% of the gas running through the compressors is wasted, exhausted into the air and water. This waste heat expressed in electrical terms is 61,276,440 watts. For every hour the compressors run, this waste is equivalent to 36 barrels of oil or 7.52 tons of coal.
This is wasted energy. It does not make electricity to run air conditioning in a cooling center. It does not get shipped to Europe for power generation during a deadly heat wave. It does not fuel trucks taking food to grocery stores. It gets exhausted into the air and water of Elliston, Virginia.
If the energy that would be consumed by this compressor station were expressed in potatoes, it would be equivalent to more than 217 thousand acres of potatoes, enough to feed over one million people for a year. This is not a “Both/And” problem. Burning methane makes the air, water, and soil hotter, displaces land and waterways we need for food, and destroys native habitat forever. There is no industrial project that justifies this. There is no amount of tax revenue that can buy back our farms, forests, and rivers. The laydown yard proposed for the construction of the Swann compressor station is a historic tomato field. It's ironic that MVP would use land that used to feed and nourish the people who lived near it to hold equipment and parts that will harm the water, air, land, and health of those that are closest to it. This project is hurting us. It's not for us. There is no local benefit, only harm.
Elliston is a food desert: there is no grocery store in Elliston, so rising gas prices mean rising grocery bills, too – people have to drive to Salem or Christiansburg to get food they can’t grow themselves. Most grocery store food is shipped over many miles, highly processed, or both – so any rise in the price of petroleum means higher food prices, and scarcity of petroleum means scarcity of food, especially if your family income is only a third of the state average, as it is in Elliston. The Eastmont Community Garden, therefore, is vital infrastructure.
As summer heat gets hotter, year after year, we need to stop creating new sources of heat pollution. Take steps to protect yourself and your neighbors from heat related health risks: find where your nearest cooling center is and read more on how to stay safe during extreme heat.
The next Montgomery County Board of Supervisors meeting is July 13th at 7:15 pm. Attend or submit a comment to the Board of Supervisors that the Swann Compressor Station has no local benefit and that Elliston, VA – already a food desert with more than its fair share of industrial pollution – is not a suitable place to construct or operate a compressor station.
The Eastmont Community Garden will have a work day July 11th from 9-2PM to finish adding three sides of fencing around the garden expansion and orchard. Please join us in caring for and expanding this vital community space!
