As Trump Pushes Liquified Natural Gas Exports, Residents in Pennsylvania Towns Push Back to Stop a Proposed LNG Terminal

CHESTER, Pa.—In this small city south of Philadelphia, trash is a problem. A thick white cloud rising from Reworld’s Delaware Valley Resource Recovery Facility, the largest trash incinerator in the country by capacity, and the stinging odor of garbage are daily reminders that mounds of waste from Philadelphia, New York City and Delaware are a toxic burden here.

Air pollution from the burning trash and emissions from other industrial sites along the river have long been blamed for contributing to high rates of deadly illnesses in Chester and the surrounding Delaware County. Beginning in 1996, the Environmental Protection Agency noted the harmful load of  industrial facilities in the city.

Now, researchers and community groups are raising alarms that Chester and its neighboring towns could face a new liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal that will increase emissions and pollution and add a potential threat of explosions. 

Their concern comes amid a push by the Trump administration to dramatically increase LNG exports, which could contribute an estimated $1.3 trillion dollars to the U.S. gross domestic product through 2040. Pennsylvania lawmakers speak of the financial benefits of a terminal along the Delaware River—they predict thousands of new jobs—but people who live in the region are most interested and worried about the quality of the air they breathe.

LNG is a form of natural gas cooled to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit. In Pennsylvania, the nation’s second largest energy-producing state, the gas comes primarily from fracking the Marcellus Shale, which runs beneath about two-thirds to three-quarters of the state.  

The condensed fuel is shipped to international markets, which has bolstered the national economy in recent years. But a recent Inside Climate News analysis has found that those exports, and specifically the tankers that transport LNG from the United States, contribute to global warming through the emission of methane, a climate super-pollutant 80 times more warming than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. 

For the community activists facing a new LNG export terminal, the risks of the tanker traffic and possible pipeline accidents far outweigh the benefits. “It’s the potential of death,” said David Kronheim. The retired computer programmer has lived in Chester for five years, about a mile  from the incinerator. If an LNG export terminal were built nearby, Kronheim said he would want to move. “It doesn’t matter where they build it. If you’re within 10 miles you’re in trouble,” said Kronheim, who has joined a local activist group that is fighting the terminal.

In 2016, a New York based company, Penn America Energy, wrote a report on the economic impact of building a $6.4 billion dollar facility that would operate out of Chester in 2023. CEO Franc James held meetings with local lawmakers but faced local pressure against allowing another polluting industry into an overburdened community and obstacles from the Biden administration to slow LNG exports. 

That changed on Jan. 20 as President Trump signed an executive order declaring a national energy emergency. LNG exports have become a focus of foreign policy and energy development. 

In April, Pennsylvania Republican Sen. David McCormick announced in a Washington Times op-ed that Penn America was collaborating with the Pennsylvania Building Trades, a union alliance, on a $7 billion LNG export terminal in Eddystone Borough, a working class white community next to Chester along the I-95 corridor south of Philadelphia. 

That terminal, he said, would contribute to future “energy domination” and “that future runs through Pennsylvania.”

“This massive, proposed project in southeastern Pennsylvania has the potential to generate billions in economic impact over the next 20 years, create 3,000 good-paying jobs, and produce $30-$40 million per year in tax revenue for this community,” McCormick said in a separate  statement on his Senate website that criticized Biden’s efforts to evaluate environmental and economic impacts of LNG exports.  

“The Biden Administration foolishly placed an indefinite pause on this and other critical projects, halting our progress towards energy independence…I’m grateful to President Trump for immediately reversing this ban, allowing proposals like this new LNG export terminal to resume and unleashing Pennsylvania’s energy dominance,” McCormick said.  

In June, Reuters reported that James, the Penn America Energy executive, had a meeting in the White House to “provide intelligence” on bringing LNG operations to southeast Pennsylvania. James told Reuters he was looking beyond the original Chester location to other possible sites in Trainer, Marcus Hook and Eddystone.

Last month, Trump signed a record agreement with the European Union to buy $750 billion dollars worth of American energy in the next three years—an amount that some experts warn is unrealistic.

Activists in Delaware County have said that McCormick’s optimistic estimates for job creation and tax revenues clash with on-the-ground realities: potential public health harm from what could be a 100-acre site in a residential area. 

Chester and Eddystone are part of what advocates have identified as an environmental justice area, where low-income neighborhoods and communities of color have been disproportionately harmed by polluting industries for decades. 

Zulene Mayfield, an activist who heads the nonprofit Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL), has been at the forefront of the environmental justice movement in Chester since 1992. 

When she hears talk of a potential economic boom in the area, Mayfield said she can’t help but take the word literally, thinking of a 2022 explosion at an LNG site in Freeport, Texas, that stemmed from a pipe failure. Vapors ignited a fireball. Damage was contained to the site, and there were no injuries reported to authorities, according to a government website.

She noted that the potential exists for liquified natural gas to combust and CRCQL is concerned about an explosion risk in Delaware County, a densely populated area. Two local hospitals closed in the past year, and Mayfield said that undercut the community’s ability to handle medical crises.

“The difference now is that they’ve ripped away the protections,” she said referring to EPA regulations. “And there have never been that many in the first place.”

Following Trump’s executive order, the U.S. Department of Energy announced in January that it was lifting Biden’s 2024 pause on LNG exports. In March, the EPA announced 31 regulatory rollbacks that it called ”the biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history” to encourage energy production.

“We know there’s no help from the EPA,” Mayfield said. “Don’t think the cavalry is coming from Washington. It is incumbent on us to become our own cavalry.”

The Delaware Riverkeeper Network, a nonprofit that aims to protect waterways, has submitted right-to-know requests to Eddystone Borough to sort through documentation or filings related to  efforts to build the export terminal. Following Sen. McCormick’s op-ed that raised Eddystone as a possible site, the borough manager for code compliance in May emailed a response to the Riverkeepers that said: “There is nothing to report as I do not know what you are referring to.”

Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, said she is concerned that Penn America Energy has been informally lining up support with elected representatives from the state. 

Eddystone and Chester are communities directly next to each other on the Delaware River. Chester takes up six square miles, Eddystone accounts for less than two square miles. Activists say that neither are large enough to safely accommodate the industry, and there isn’t a site to build in either location that wouldn’t infringe on homes, small businesses, churches, or major throughways. 

“They would have to go in and destroy the community,” Mayfield said, referring to Eddystone. “[An LNG terminal] is way too large for a populated area like this.”

Mayfield said she is just as worried about LNG in Eddystone as she was about Chester.

Comparing the situation to a house on fire,she said that the threat was the same, regardless of which town in Delaware County that investors had their sights on. “If they go to Eddystone, that’s the equivalent of a neighbor’s house on fire,” she said. “If their house is on fire, our house is going to burn, too.”

Turning their efforts to resisting plans for LNG in Eddystone, Mayfield and Carluccio are leading an education and mobilization campaign across Delaware County with public and virtual forums. Researchers from Haverford College have joined to explain how the LNG terminal would affect the county, beyond economic terms.  

“They want us dumb,” said Mayfield at a public forum that CRCQL sponsored last month. “They don’t want educated thinkers. They want workers—bargain basement thinkers who won’t challenge them.”

A crowd of about 30 residents, community organizers and researchers sat on wooden pews one hot summer day at the Quaker Providence Friends Meeting House in Media, about six miles north of Chester, to learn how LNG’s promise for economic development could affect their health.

Mayfield and Carluccio said residents in the affluent area near Chester should care about the LNG terminal. “The fight is getting those who don’t see and smell it [to understand] that you are in just as much danger,” Mayfield said.

Residents living in towns not directly burdened by the industries that pollute Chester might not be aware of the dangerous air emissions that waft inland from the waterfront, she said.

Chester, a predominantly Black community, is burdened by a disproportionate amount of polluting industries, which fits a larger trend of systemic racial bias, along with lower socioeconomic status, as a defining factor of where these industries are historically located. A General Accounting Office study in the 1980s found 75 percent of hazardous waste sites across eight states were in low-income communities of color. 

Mayfield pointed out that what happens in Chester now will affect nearby communities. Majority white suburbs will be affected by the LNG terminal’s traffic and air pollution, she said. Harm won’t be contained to just one zip code.  

Lauren Minsky, a health studies professor at Haverford College who spoke during the meeting, said her research on cancer in Delaware County found industries on the river had contributed to pollution that correlates with a range of heightened rates of deadly diseases in southeast Pennsylvania. 

Minsky presented a map during the meeting that tracked weather patterns and showed how wind moves northwest and inland from the waterfront. Towns farther from the river, including Media, would be affected, and the air from the waterfront was shown to be laden with particulate matter and carcinogens, she said.

“You can think of [it] as a sacrifice zone where people are losing their lives because of these facilities,” Minsky said. ““People in these communities are dying young.”

“It’s not always routine, it’s not only where you work, it’s not only your lifestyle, it can be the land and the air where you live that affects you,” Mayfield said about the causes of cancer and asthma in Delaware County. “Our children literally cannot breathe.”

Children in Eddystone developed Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a blood cancer, at a rate 1,051 percent higher than the national average, according to Minsky’s research. Meanwhile in Chester City, female rates of laryngeal cancer were 201 percent higher than the national average, and male rates of liver and bile cancer were 97 percent higher than the national average, her research  found. 

A study published in May by Johns Hopkins researchers focused on Chester and surrounding boroughs in an effort to better account for and assess the noncarcinogenic health effects of cumulative chemical exposures. The researchers found that the mix of pollutants from the various industries posed more health risks to nearby communities–called “fenceline communities” in the study–than the harm associated with a single pollutant. 

The Johns Hopkins team noted that “communities along the Delaware River in southeastern Pennsylvania have long faced high levels of pollution from petro-chemical refineries, municipal waste incinerators, and several other industrial facilities.” The EPA had for years documented elevated rates of infant mortality, cancer mortality, and asthma among residents. 

Other groups that attended Mayfield’s meeting included Swarthmore College’s Campus Coalition Concerning Chester, Earth Quaker Action Team, and Choices, a youth environmental justice group affiliated with CRCQL.

While CRCQL has been spreading the word of environmental justice and rallying support against LNG proposals this summer through public meetings, Choices has been doing its own  advocacy. Its members are between 8 and 18 years old.

Their work has included testing soil samples for lead with University of Pennsylvania researchers, volunteering at a local farm, building solar panels, and events to support and inspire the community.

Nolan Fontaine, who has an Ed.D. in sociology, equity studies and education, is an American Indian organizer who also leads Choices. Modern day Chester is located in the Okehocking and Lenapehocken region, and Fontaine’s activism includes reclaiming his familial roots along the Delaware River. He said Choices aims to change the narrative about industries that came to the city promising jobs and left residents fighting for air. 

Hope and love for the community, he said, is intertwined with the resistance to the trash incinerator and polluting sites along the river. It’s evident in Choices initiatives including, “Sowing Seeds of Hope,” a gardening event and plant giveaway.

“It’s a small act of resistance. While we aren’t able to shut down Reworld Covanta yet,” Fontaine said of Chester’s trash incinerator, “we can control our homes and our small environments to make them cleaner, fresher, and a safe place for us to be able to breathe.”