There are plenty of issues that are Republican vs. Democrat. A natural gas pipeline project in Brookfield, Connecticut seems to buck the trend.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s John Moritz to discuss his article, “In Brookfield, opposition to natural gas project crosses party lines,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read John's story here.
WSHU: Hello, John, this story appears to be a classic example of NIMBY, not in my backyard. Is that what attracted you to it?
JM: I think what attracted me to this story was that when we talk about natural gas expansion and natural gas pipelines in the northeast, it's often framed in a view that it's environmentalist versus the Trump administration or more conservative politicians who are concerned about keeping down costs. And what I think this story showed is that the reality of the situation is more complex when you look at the communities that have to bear most of these projects. And you're right, you know, some of the sentiment can be described as, you know, nimbyism, or people concerned about the impacts of their community, but that doesn't follow along the typical left right divide we often think about when talking about things like natural gas projects, or even, as I've written about before, solar projects, which have gotten pushed back in more blue communities where they've been trying to build.
WSHU: Now, let's talk about the issue with natural gas and why we have such a problem supplying natural gas to Connecticut.
JM: So, natural gas is not produced anywhere locally in Connecticut or New England. It's produced in places like Pennsylvania, Texas,and even Canada, and it has to be shipped into the state along pipelines. There are three major interstate pipelines serving Connecticut: the Tennessee, the Iroquois, and the Algonquin systems. And in order to get more, all three pipelines are currently operating at or near their capacity, particularly in winter, when the demand for natural gas is higher. So in order to build or to get any more gas into the state, we either have to build more pipelines or expand the capacity of the existing pipelines, which is what this project, the Iroquois project in Brookfield, is attempting to do.
WSHU: Now, could you tell us a little bit, give us a little bit of background, what this project in Brookfield is all about? You've touched on it a little bit.
JM: So in the town of Brookfield, which is just over the New York border, there is currently a compressor station that consists of two gas-fired compressors. So essentially, what this station is doing is it takes a little bit of gas out of the pipeline, burns it to, you know, spin a turbine and produce power, and then it uses that power to push more gas through the pipeline. So it's essentially compressing the gas and increasing the capacity of the pipeline. What the Iroquois, which is the pipeline owner, wants to do is essentially double the size of that facility, building two new compressors in Brookfield that would allow it to push an additional 125 million cubic feet of gas through the pipeline each day. That's about an 8% expansion of the pipeline's overall capacity.
WSHU: Now, let's talk a little bit about the politics of Brookfield. This is a town that voted for the president.
JM: Yes, the town voted for President Trump in 2024. It's voted for the Republican in four of the last five elections. The town did vote for former President Biden in 2020 and it has a Democratic majority on the board of selectmen. So it's not a dark red town by any means, but for Connecticut. It's certainly, you know, a more conservative community.
WSHU: It's also the town where the Republican leader in the Senate is from, Stephen Harding.
JM: Yes, so Steve Harding is the top Republican in the Connecticut State Senate, and his point, which is the point made by a lot of residents in this town, is that the project is being built by Iroquois, and they've stated this publicly. Their intention is to sell the additional gas that would flow through the pipeline to customers in New York. So the pipeline, you want to think of a map, the pipeline kind of crosses diagonally across the southwestern part of Connecticut, then it goes underneath Long Island Sound and then pops up again in Long Island, and it runs West in Long Island and then terminates in the Bronx, New York. So their purpose in this expansion is to sell more gas to residents in Long Island and New York City, which opponents, such as Steve Harding, have pointed out that Connecticut, they don't see that Connecticut or their community is getting the benefit from the project, even though they're the ones having to host it.
What makes that situation a little bit more complicated is that the pipeline currently serves about 30% of the gas that flows through the pipeline ends up going to either residential or commercial customers in Connecticut or to fuel a handful of power plants in the state that are producing electricity. An economist I spoke to said, you know, even if the additional gas is being sold or is being intended to be sold to Long Island, one, it doesn't prevent Connecticut from purchasing that gas at some point in the future. And in fact, the company says that gas will be available to Connecticut on the majority of days, probably not in the winter, when the pipeline is at the, you know, its most constrained point, but on the majority of the days during the year, the company says this extra gas will be able to be available to Connecticut customers. The other thing the economist mentioned is that, you know, just by the factor of increasing the capacity, it will lower the cost of the gas compared to the national average, essentially, which you know, would both be a benefit to gas customers in the state, as well as to electric customers who are paying to have that gas be used to fuel power plants.
WSHU: But the residents of the area are concerned about safety.
JM: Exactly. So their concern is that this pipeline is located about a third to about a half a mile away from a nearby middle school, where a lot of the people in Brookfield send their children to school. In addition, because the compressor station, as I mentioned, burns gas to fuel its compression, that burning releases local air particulate matter emissions into the air that would be released into the surrounding community. So that's one of the other points that they've raised concerns over.
WSHU: Now this also plays into interstate relationships between New York and Connecticut. What's Governor Ned Lamont's position on this? He's a Democrat, and we've got a Democrat as governor in New York. What are they saying about this?
JM: So Lamont has not weighed in directly on the Iroquois compressor station expansion project. However, his Department of Energy and Environmental Protection has issued draft permits, essentially saying that unless anything changes, their plan at this point is to approve the project. We're awaiting the final release of those permits, which could come around March or potentially later if legal actions stall that consideration. But more generally speaking, Lamont has spoken with Governor Kathy Hochul in New York about his desire to see more pipeline expansions, or pipeline projects being built to serve Connecticut in New England, as I mentioned, you know, the Iroquois and the other pipelines that serve our state, they pass through New York before they come here. So in order to get that expansion built, you would also need the approval of New York regulators. In the Iroquois case, New York regulators have already approved and given all the permits on their end that would allow the gas to flow into Connecticut, and now they're waiting on Connecticut to give the final approval to allow that gas to continue on its way to Long Island. More recently, the New York regulators have taken a more adversarial or a more cautious approach to another project known as the Constitution pipeline. It wouldn't come into Connecticut, but it would connect to the Iroquois and the Tennessee pipeline, the other two serving the Connecticut and New England economies, and it would essentially serve as a direct conduit bringing gas up from Pennsylvania into those pipelines so that they could service New England.
WSHU: So bottom line, what do you think is going to be, what's, what's going to happen here? Because of this, there's a lawsuit; as a matter of fact, Save the Sound has filed a lawsuit on this whole issue. So where do we stand? Is there going to be any movement?
JM: It's hard for me to say what will happen on this particular project, but I think what the opposition in Brookfield has shown us is that, you know, in order for this to happen, pipelines to be built, they have to be built across communities that aren't necessarily the direct beneficiary of the pipeline. And if, as you know, Republicans and some Democrats, including Lamont, want to see an increase in natural gas, it's going to require cooperation between the states and the federal government to overcome some of these local concerns. Environmentalists, I would point out, a lot of people who are concerned about the climate do not want to see these pipelines being expanded or more natural gas being brought into the state, and they have come down on the side of the local residents who are also opposed to the project.
WSHU: So it's not something you can place different people in. It's all jumbled up. And it really comes down to what your interests are, rather than what your politics is.
JM: Yeah, I think it shows that local interests on these types of energy projects really kind of jumble the political spectrum. And it creates, you know, in certain circumstances, a set of odd bedfellows in terms of who we find supporting these projects and who we find in the opposition.
