SC residents fear pipeline planned for their backyards

VARNVILLE — Jake Gohagan gazed over the front porch of his family’s 208 acres. Dusk turned to dark and rain poured, just out of reach from the carpenter bee traps protecting the sanded hardwood pine planks.

Gohagan, 34, lives in nearby Hampton but spends his spare time tending to the land in his lineage for more than a century. He wished for dry weather so he could show the cemetery predating the Civil War or the heritage pecan orchard on the property.

Even more, he fears that the cornerstone of his family’s legacy is under siege.

Gohagan is one of the Lowcountry residents who learned about an incoming, major gas pipeline planned under their feet. He received a letter from an affiliate of Texas energy titan Kinder Morgan Inc. asking his permission for surveyors to canvass his family’s property. Shovels are far from hitting his ancestral dirt, but facing the company’s ambitions, he is preparing for a fight.

“It is all set in this big corporation’s favor who does not care anything at all about anybody who stepped foot on this land,” he said.

The pipeline’s path was revealed at an August meeting at Dukes Barbecue in Walterboro, just 11 miles south of the gas-fired power plant planned by state-owned utility Santee Cooper and energy giant Dominion. It will stretch 71 miles from Georgia, across the Savannah River, into Hampton County, along the northern rim of the ACE Basin watershed, before terminating at the proposed plant in Canadys.

In 2023, officials with Santee Cooper and Dominion approached South Carolina legislators warning the state’s rapid residential and industrial development had them bumping up against their operating capabilities. The South Carolina General Assembly agreed, passing sweeping energy permitting reforms earlier this year to allow the two companies to collaborate on retrofitting the old Canadys coal plant with gas, build a pipeline to service it while not affording landowners protections from eminent domain. But environmental groups remain skeptical.

Some argue the development was only necessary because of expanding energy-gulping data centers on the grid – which Dominion executive Keller Kissam, whose company counts just a singe data center as a customer, told The Post and Courier is an overblown concern. Groups like the Coastal Conservation League also fear the ancillary impacts of the state’s continued reliance on fossil fuels when residential energy consumption has remained stable.

Then there is the land itself.

The ACE Basin remains one of the state’s most carefully observed, underdeveloped regions, with hundreds of new acres added regularly through conservation easements. A pipeline facilitating new development in the region, some fear, jeopardizes a piece of its identity.

“The pipeline route crosses a lot of wetlands, and it also appears to cross a lot of properties with conservation easements on them,” said Taylor Allred, energy and climate program director for the Coastal Conservation League. “I think that that begs the question of, what’s the intent of those different conservation easement agreements, and how does a fossil fuel pipeline fit into that?”

Since the barbecue-scented convening, the company chosen to build the pipeline – Kinder Morgan — has started the long process of introducing themselves to some 227 landowners across three counties, seeking their trust and ultimate consent to scout their properties.

Allen Fore, vice president of public affairs at the Texas company, said that corporate officials want to gauge where the pipeline absolutely cannot go — environmentally or culturally sensitive areas, or simply places where landowners do not want the line.

Some residents received an invitation to a gathering in a Hampton County Airport hangar, where company representatives presented the map of the pipeline. Thin blue lines depicted the 300-foot area the company wanted to survey, but the pipeline would only impact 50 feet and itself spans a 30-inch diameter. Refreshments were served. To disturb their properties, Kinder Morgan would offer money, but attendees say officials wouldn’t discuss how much.

Among the meeting’s viewers was Rhonda McAlhaney, whose mother, uncle and aunt own adjacent pieces of property in Hampton County that Kinder Morgan wants to survey. She joined Gohagan under his family porch with other property owners the next evening, drinking beers, forming the early seeds of grassroots organization against the high powered company coming for their land.

Construction on the pipeline is to begin in 2029, Fore said, but the company is far from breaking ground. Officials still needs to present the pipeline’s final path to the federal government, navigate a series of environmental permits and fend off challenges coming from conservation groups or landowners like McAlhaney.

The 63-year-old grew up visiting her grandmother’s property that has been passed down through her family. She and her husband Jay own land nicked by Kinder Morgan’s blueprint. Even negligible access to the property would be unacceptable to her.

“I don’t care if it’s an inch on mine,” McAlhaney said. “I don’t want it there.”