An $80 billion company is about to run a natural gas pipeline between Austin and San Antonio.
Called the Permian Highway Pipeline, it will carry natural gas mined in the Permian Basin over 400 miles, through the Hill Country, affecting Kimble, Gillespie, Blanco, and Hays Counties. It’s construction threatens the drinking water of 2 million Texans, and the company, Kinder Morgan, is using eminent domain to build it.
“The companies use intimidating tactics,” David Baker, the executive director of the Wimberley Valley Watershed Association, told the Audubon in June. “Landowners who have never been through the process of condemnation are receiving letters full of legalese that threaten lawsuits and injunctions.”
Here in Texas, oil and gas companies are allowed to use eminent domain to build their pipelines. The state legislature’s justification is essentially that pipelines are publicly available infrastructure, a utility, that provides direct benefits to communities (natural gas powering your stove at home, for instance). This doesn’t seem to be a good excuse for the Permian Highway Pipeline, however.
“The Permian Highway Pipeline, a very large percentage of that gas — if not all of it — will be for export. Where’s the public good in that?” asks Chuck Lesniak, quoted by KUT in February of this year, who serves on the Liquid Pipeline Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of Transportation.
“Why should they have the right of eminent domain … for the profits of their shareholders?” — Chuck Lesniak
Kinder Morgan has freely admitted that most of the product transported by the pipeline will go directly to international markets. Under current Texas law, Kinder Morgan can decide where to put the pipeline, whose land they’re going to take, what the pipeline will carry now (and in the future!) all by themselves without a process to involve communities who will be directly affected by the project.
“The most obvious problem with pipeline oversight in Texas is they turn the job over to the private pipeline companies and let them choose their route,” Chuck said to KUT. “There is no control by Texas government with people in Texas having no say at any stage over what route a pipeline can take.”
More than 10 bills were introduced to the Texas Legislature this year, aimed at mitigating the damage pipeline companies can do to communities and environments. Instead of passing even one of those bills, lawmakers instead criminalized “interrupting” pipeline activity — passing a bill in June specifically designed by oil and gas companies to federally prosecute pipeline protestors.
Central Texas is pushing back, hard. Kinder Morgan is facing a coalition of communities, nonprofits, and local governments who opposed to the pipeline’s path. Buda, Kyle, San Marcos, Wimberley, Woodcreek, Hays County, Gillespie County, Travis Audubon, Hays Trinity Groundwater Conservation District, and Hill Country Underground Water Conservation District have all passed resolutions against the pipeline, according to the nonprofit Hill Country Alliance. Countless town halls and community meetings have been packed with locals and landowners expressing concerns and opposition.
The Wimberley Valley Watershed Association has a petition asking Kinder Morgan to move the pipeline, which has, as of this writing, collected a little over five thousand signatures. There’s also a “Move the Pipeline Save the Water” campaign highlighting the threat the pipeline poses to Central Texas groundwater.
The current route puts the pipeline directly over the Edwards Aquifer Recharge zone and the Trinity Aquifer watershed, threatening the groundwater with a natural gas leak.
Environmentalists are threatening to sue over the threat poses to the habitat of the native golden-cheeked warbler, an endangered species found nowhere else in the world. There are concerns about clear-cutting oak forests spreading oak wilt onto private land, decimating live oak populations.
Although pipelines are legally required to “mitigate,” or offset, the damage they do to the habitats of protected species, they’re not required to restore the actual habitat they destroy. Pipeline companies can buy credits of restored or already-protected land from “mitigation banks.” This might satisfy the law, but it does nothing for trees and nests destroyed on private land.
In April, the City of Kyle and a coalition of landowners took Kinder Morgan and the Texas Railroad Commission to court over the lack of oversight to the pipeline. They hoped to force the Railroad Commission to develop a process of community input and oversight that balances the financial and legislative powers of billion dollar energy companies against the public good of the communities their projects threaten.
“Kinder Morgan just gets to move the pipeline the cheapest route for them,” he said. “But, I think that it should be the safest route, and I believe that the Texas Railroad Commission has the power to do this.” Landowner Heinz Roesch told KUT in April.
“They can come right thought the city of Kyle without so much as a public hearing or an environmental impact study and their only responsibility is to their shareholders — and that’s not the way it should be.” The Mayor of Kyle, Travis Mitchel, told KXAN.
“We’re asking the Railroad Commission to help establish a process that is fair, transparent and allows the community to have a say,” he said to KUT when asked about the case.
In June the City lost — but not without sympathy from the presiding judge.
“The Court is concerned with a power that, when exercised by a governmental entity, must be done in the harsh light of public scrutiny of open meetings and public notices, but, when exercised by a private entity, may be determined without public notice by a select few driven primarily by their financial gain,” Judge Lora Livingston wrote.
The City and the coalition of landowners, plus Hays County (who just voted to join the lawsuit) are currently appealing the decision in court.
In a questionable PR move, Kinder Morgan sued the City of Kyle over new rules the city instituted to keep the pipeline away from homes, schools, and hospitals in case of explosions.
“There’s a regulatory process in place that we are following,” Allen Fore, Kinder Morgan’s VP of public affairs, told KUT in late May. “In the middle of the game, some want to change the rules.” Kinder Morgan will start construction in a few months and are aiming to finish in late 2020.
How to help:
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Sign and share this petition
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Donate to The Wimberley Valley Watershed Association, a 501c3 nonprofit fighting the pipeline
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Email Allen Fore and tell him what you think of calling the threat to our neighborhoods and lands “a game”
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Visit this website to learn more about efforts to reroute the pipeline
(Article originally published on the writer’s Medium account August 2, 2019. Also published in the Austin Sierra Club newsletter “The Austin Sierrian” August 2019.)