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by Christine Zhu, NC Newsline
April 3, 2025

Areas of North Carolina surrounding a proposed pipeline project would suffer from further environmental pollution, according to a report released this week by the Sierra Club.

The Southeast Supply Enhancement Project (SSEP) to the Williams Company’s Transco Pipeline system is a pipeline running from Virginia to Alabama that would move up to 1.5 billion cubic feet of methane gas each day.

It’s an expansion of an existing pipeline that runs from the Gulf Coast to New York, transporting about a third of the gas used in the country.

SSEP is the largest new pipeline project on the East Coast since the Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, both of which were started in 2014.

Williams proposed SSEP to provide more energy reliability in the region. The pipeline would add the enough natural gas to serve approximately 9.8 million homes, according to Williams’ website.

The project would have detrimental effects on North Carolina, especially for low-income residents and communities of color, which would be disproportionately affected, environmental leaders said at a press conference on Wednesday.

“We are already overburdened by industrial pollution,” said Crystal Cavalier-Keck, director and co-founder of 7 Directions of Service, an indigenous-led collective focusing on environmental justice. “These communities are treated as sacrifice zones for fossil fuel expansion with little to no say in the decision-making process.”

Cavalier-Keck, a citizen of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, said she lives in a frontline community of the kind that are highly exposed to the impacts of environmental hazards and climate change.

Emissions from gas transported by the pipeline would be incompatible with meeting North Carolina’s climate goals, the report found.

SSEP includes a section called the Salem Loop, which would add 24 miles of 42-inch-wide pipeline in Guilford, Forsyth, and Davidson counties in North Carolina.

Another expansion, known as the Eden Loop, brings about an additional 31 miles of 42-inch-wide pipeline, primarily in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, but crossing into Rockingham County, North Carolina.

“That’s 55 miles of new pipeline total that would be located largely alongside existing pipeline,” Alison Kirsch, senior energy campaigns analyst for the Sierra Club, said. “Air pollution is already bad in the areas where Transco is proposing to build SSEP, including in low-income and communities of color.”

North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality will need to consider air and water quality permit applications for SSEP. Environmentalists are urging DEQ to factor in the threats that the project poses to the air and water sources of local communities.

The Sierra Club encouraged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to conduct a more nuanced environmental justice analysis than Transco did, including considering an environmental impact statement.

Aminah Ghaffar-Fulp, policy director for 7 Directions of Service, emphasized the importance of acknowledging the real communities that will be impacted by the project regardless of any economic or monetary benefits.

“This is a dangerous project is going to cause a lot of harm in communities that already have a bunch of polluters, particularly Black, indigenous and low-income communities, and there’s nothing that can change the negative environmental impact that this is going to have,” she said. “Regardless of how much money it might look like it’s going to bring to the state, it is really just going to line the pockets of certain companies… the overall impact is not worth the sacrifice.”

NC Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com.