Seven years ago, this past week, landowners and local officials began receiving communications from Dominion Energy announcing its intention to build a natural gas pipeline from West Virginia to North Carolina. Initially called the Southeast Reliability Project, the project was renamed the Atlantic Coast Pipeline when Dominion formed a joint venture with Duke Energy for the project, announced at an early September 2014 press conference in Richmond with then-Governor Terry McAuliffe.
A May 22, 2014 article in The Recorder, the local paper serving Highland and Bath Counties, Virginia, reported that the project would cost $4 billion and be operational by the end of 2018. The Chairman of the Highland County Board of Supervisors upon hearing the news of the proposed project exclaimed: “Holy cow! What can you say? There might be nothing we can do. It’s going to sock us.”
Well, it turned out there was something that could done. And it was indeed done!