RePercussion Section: All One Pipeline

by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist

Carrying pressurized methane and stretching for hundreds—or even thousands—of miles, natural gas pipelines are, by far, the biggest components of fracking infrastructure. They are also exceedingly prone to corrosion, ruptures, leaks, and explosions. 

Because they pose additional health and safety threats that are specific to the communities and ecosystems they traverse, the Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating the Risks and Harms of Fracking, 9th edition, is full of pipelines. They have individual names, back stories, horror stories, permitting decisions, accident reports, citizen opposition campaigns, and lawsuits. We attempt to follow them all. 

There’s the proposed Atlantic Coast pipeline, which looked to be financially unfeasible—until its debt was guaranteed by Dominion and Duke Energy. 

And there’s the Albany Loop pipeline, which would have conveyed fracked gas across the Hudson River—until public opposition, on climate grounds, forced its owner to abandon plans for it.

There’s the Spectra Energy pipeline, which, in 2016, exploded, destroyed a house, injured the homeowner, and damaged several other homes in Salem Township, Pennsylvania. The cause of that accident: corrosion. 

There’s the Revolution pipeline, which, in 2018, exploded and destroyed a house in Beaver County, Pennsylvania after going into service just a few days earlier. The cause of that accident: heavy rains and landslides.

There’s the Enbridge pipeline, which exploded in Lincoln County, Kentucky in 2019, killing one, injuring six, and forcing 75 people from their homes. According the final accident report, the cause of that blast was a combination of “a manufacturing defect, degraded coating, and ineffective cathodic protection applied following a 2014 gas flow reversal project, which resulted in hydrogen-induced cracking at the outer surface.”  

There’s the Constitution pipeline which was to bring fracked gas from northeast Pennsylvania to New York State. That pipeline received federal approval and all the necessary permits from the state of Pennsylvania, but New York refused to issue permits. Nevertheless, in preparation for construction, the company seized land by eminent domain along the Pennsylvania side of the planned route and, with the assistance of armed federal marshals, destroyed a family’s sugar maple grove. Canceled in 2020, the Constitution pipeline was never built. The century-old maple trees remain as stumps.

There’s the PennEast pipeline, which would have transported fracked gas from Pennsylvania to New Jersey. It was blocked after New Jersey denied key water permits. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the pipeline company. But, in 2021, after massive public opposition, PennEast was canceled anyway.  

And then there’s the $6.2 billion Mountain Valley pipeline, which also lost key water permits in 2021, and, because of violations for erosion and sedimentation control, had to pay over a half a million dollars in fines by consent order of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. Mountain Valley was given new momentum in 2023 when the debt ceiling deal between Congress and the White House removed many of these legal obstacles and required its approval. Its construction is now underway—even as an ongoing civil disobedience campaign is slowing that work down.

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All together, more than 300,000 miles of natural gas transmission pipelines traverse the United States. Each of these lines is serviced, every 40 to 100 miles, by compressor stations that maintain the pressure of the gas flowing through it. 

As we document in the fracking science Compendium, each of these compressor stations—even absent spectacular accidents—represent significant sources of air pollutants, including benzene and formaldehyde. The data are clear: pipelines plus their compressor station sidekicks create health and safety risks to those living nearby while offering no economic benefits. Instead, transmission pipelines are associated with loss of tax revenue and economic development for the communities where they are sited. 

Studies have identified 70 different air pollutants in the emissions from the compressor stations that service pipelines. Of these, 39 are linked to cancer. A 2020 study found that proximity to higher amounts of volatile emissions from compressor stations were linked with higher death rates. A 2021 study found “alarming levels” of volatile organic compounds, including cancer-causing benzene, in the indoor air of homes located near a pipeline and compressor station in Ohio.

The Atlantic Bridge pipeline, which intends to ferry fracked gas beneath Boston Harbor and into Canada, is serviced by a compressor station that was sited in a densely populated environmental justice community in Weymouth, Massachusetts. 

Since becoming operational in January 2021, the Weymouth compressor station has suffered multiple accidents that have sent plumes of gas and volatile organic compounds into the community’s airshed. In addition, its routine maintenance requires the periodic venting of methane into the atmosphere. 

In 2022, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) re-examined its decision to grant the permit and issued a statement saying that it “likely erred” in siting the compressor station in a where it did. However, the Commission stopped short of revoking its approval. Local opposition continues.

Petroleum pipelines from Baytown and Beaumont, Texas, to Linden, New Jersey.
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) 208-LU-37C-1.

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Keeping track of all the pipeline names, fights, and tragedies playing out across multiple Northeast states can be overwhelming. Behind them all, though, lie just one name—Big Inch—and one origin story, which is all about war. 

Prior to World War II, oil was transported from pumpjacks in Texas to the Northeast via ships across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Atlantic coast. But then, in 1942, Germany U-boats began patrolling the U.S. coastline, targeting merchant vessels, including oil tankers. 

The U.S. Secretary of Interior quickly created a new non-profit corporation consisting of all the big U.S. oil majors of the day. Called the Wartime Emergency Pipelines company and backed by public financing, the corporation’s mission was the construction of two pipelines, each of which would extend more than 1000 miles and serve as the longest, heaviest pipeline project in the world. And it was all going to get done, as the corporation’s name made clear, under the emergency of wartime, with all the haste and secrecy required.

Pipelines had been used since the 19th century to transport oil but never across half a continent or at the diameter and high pressures needed for long-distance transport, a task that requires a lot of steel. Without federal financing, the construction of wide, thick, long-distance, high-pressure pipelines was simply not an economically viable option for the oil industry.

Their names were Little Inch and Big Inch. Twenty inches in diameter, Little Inch ran refined oil from Beaumont, Texas to New Jersey and Pennsylvania. 

Big Inch was even more impressive. At 24 inches in diameter, Big Inch was fully three time wider than the widest pipelines in use by the oil industry to date. Big Inch largely followed the same route as Little Inch, but it carried crude oil and branched out at its terminus to serve New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Along the way, Big Inch passed under 33 rivers and 200 creeks and lakes. 

During its operation from August 1943 until August 1945, Big Inch delivered 300,000 gallons of oil a day, avoided enemy attack, and become a symbol of American triumph. As noted by the Library of Congress, “the wartime success of the Big Inch and Little Big Inch ushered in the expansion of pipeline usage that continues to the present day.”

The Big Inch oil pipeline being laid in Pennsylvania during the winter of 1942-43. Surrounded by secrecy, Big Inch was financed by the federal government and constructed with the cooperation of major U.S. oil companies as a response to attacks by German submarines on oil tankers in the Atlantic. After the war, Big Inch was repurposed as a natural gas pipeline to sidestep the demands of striking coal miners. Today, it operates as the Enbridge Texas Eastern pipeline and has entrenched natural gas dependency in the Northeast.

When the war ended, Little and Big became federal war surplus property in need of disposal. The government did not want the maintenance costs, and arguments flew over what should be done with them. 

And then, in 1946, a coal strike triggered a fuel shortage. 

The Tennessee Gas Transmission Corporation leased Little and Big and filled them with natural gas for the ad-hoc, union-defying purpose of replacing coal with another fuel. 

The table was set. In 1947, in the largest sale of war surplus made to the private sector, the Texas East Transmission Corporation purchased Little and Big—having incorporated a week prior for the sole purpose of doing so—and kept natural gas flowing from Texas to the Northeast energy markets. 

Little Inch turned out to be ill-suited for gas transportation, but Big Inch, re-christened as the Texas Eastern pipeline (TETCo), is still in service and is remains one of largest natural gas pipeline systems in the United States. 

It’s owned by Calgary-based Enbridge now, and many of the various pipelines named in the first third of this column—including the Atlantic Bridge Project, the Algonquin Pipeline, and the Weymouth compressor station—are part of it or connect to it. 

It’s all one pipeline, and it was designed with war in mind.