Protect NC from a biogas buildout

An energy giant and an industrial agriculture titan are teaming up to keep massive, polluting hog waste lagoons the status quo in North Carolina while increasing our dependence on burning gas for heat and electricity.

Dominion Energy and Smithfield Foods want to capture methane from animal waste lagoons, transport it through a series of new pipelines to a central facility where it will be processed, and then added to the gas flowing through existing natural gas pipelines — all under the guise of “clean energy.”

While the companies are trying to sell methane capture as a positive, this process will not lessen the amount of air pollution at the farm and will actually create a secondary source of hazardous air pollution at another location. These projects also do nothing to change the existing system of spraying waste from the lagoons onto nearby fields, which harms the communities living next to the farms and threatens nearby waters with toxic leaks and runoff.

As a result of the North Carolina Farm Act of 2021, the system to capture the methane — called digesters — will only require a general permit instead of an environmental permit, meaning there will be limited opportunity for the public to provide input.

What can you do to make your voice heard?

The opportunities we do have for public input are coming up soon. The Department of Environmental Quality will be holding hearings on the draft of these general permits in April. Can you attend one of these events?

If you are interested in attending one of these hearings and/or need assistance drafting a comment, please contact Ridge Graham at [email protected].

The draft permits fail to protect the local environment and nearby communities, but DEQ could include provisions to improve existing lagoon systems so that they are less likely to leak or overflow into ground and surface waters. The permit should also require monitoring equipment at these facilities to ensure compliance with clean water and air regulations.

Having strong conditions in these permits is also vital because these digesters are most likely an attempt by both Dominion and Smithfield to skirt limitations placed upon them. Dominion wants to claim that the methane captured from the hog lagoons will help meet the Governor’s clean energy goals by offsetting the emissions from its power plants. And Smithfield may attempt to undo the current state moratorium on new, large-scale hog farms by overstating the need for more methane to be used in their new digester systems — meaning the creation of more massive, noxious hog farms.

North Carolina deserves a better system for managing its hog waste than what is currently in place, and we can start by making sure NC DEQ creates the strongest possible regulations for these biogas digester general permits.

Protecting the Central and Southern Appalachian Mountain Region