Birmingham, Alabama
It is unsurprising that the region around Birmingham, Alabama is a methane hotspot. This is one of the very few places on earth where all three of the main raw ingredients for iron – coal, iron ore, and limestone – are grouped in one spot. The city was founded in 1871 by Elyton Land Company, which represented a group of investors in cotton, banking, and railroads, to exploit that rare coincidence. By employing just-freed Black workers, who were usually not unionized, Birmingham steel mills hoped to outcompete Northern and Midwestern ones. The Most Segregated City in America: City Planning and Civil Rights in Birmingham, 1920–1980, p. 14. Over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most heavy industry left the area, but coal remained. Birmingham’s coal industry, from its origins in a scheme to extract the most by giving people the least, inaugurated a way of being: a set of relationships between energy companies and their neighborhoods; between drills, mines, rivers and soils; between those who profit from extraction, and those who live in its midst.
On the 1800 Histories map, which is based on data collected in 2019-2020, there are two ultra-emission sites near Birmingham. They constitute physical – if not directly visible – evidence of the ongoing effects of Birmingham’s coal industry and its history. But the plumes’ histories are not one-sided stories of emission. They are histories of struggles over who is allowed to use, or live in, or pillage, the land. Birmingham is a place where people are, unavoidably and personally, fighting over methane emissions and everything that goes with them, all the time. Hoping to see the sites of that conflict for myself, I visited both plumes on a trip to Birmingham in June of 2023.
My first stop was at the plume that appears to hover above a rail yard nestled in the historic Black neighborhoods of the city’s northeast. The rail yard belongs to the Bluestone Coke plant. Bluestone Coke is owned by the family of West Virginia governor Jim Justice, who bought the facility in 2019 from ERP Coke, which had in turn bought it from Walter Energy in 2016 after the company filed for bankruptcy. A detour into the history of the Bluestone Coke plant’s former operator presages tragically the contemporary fusion of methane and coal in corporations with carefree relations to human lives. On September 23, 2001, a methane explosion in a Walter Energy mine less than an hour down the road from Birmingham killed 13 people. A judge initially fined Walter Energy – which reportedly around that time had a revenue of about $2 billion each year – $3,000, for violating mine safety regulations. In 2012, after a few appeals, the penalty was completely overturned.
Bluestone’s own history is less explosive, and more of a slow burn. In an October 2021 Alabama Political Reporter article Bluestone announced that it was idling its plant. It blamed ERP’s mismanagement for the plant’s degraded state, noting that “this facility … had been deteriorating for an extended period of time due to the financial condition of the facility,” and that "Bluestone has invested tens of millions of dollars into the facility in making repairs to make the facility more compliant” (emphasis my own) – tacitly admitting that it had intentionally been operating a non-compliant plant for the previous two years. The article adds, rather sunnily, that “this significant investment will pave the way for the facility to be a compliant, significant Alabama employer for the future.”
The attempt at environmental compliance was even more begrudging than it seemed. Since Bluestone’s acquisition the plant had racked up $60 million of potential fines for environmental violations. In August 2021, after a community group heard that the plant’s operating permit was up for renewal and went to the Jefferson County Health Department to testify about ash and soot covering their homes and cars, the Department did not renew the plant’s operating permit. The plant appealed and stayed open for another two months; it was only idled in October after its equipment, which until then had been operable although faulty enough to allow pollutants to escape into the neighborhood through leaky doors and valves, finally became actually inoperable.
Over the next couple of years the plant remained idle. The Jefferson County Board of Health, along with GASP (a clean air advocacy group) and the Southern Environmental Law Center, got a consent decree passed that would force Bluestone Coke to pay nearly a million dollars in fines; Bluestone was reported to have quit paying in 2022, leaving about $300,000 unpaid.
When I visited the plant’s site in June 2023, it was derelict. Untrimmed plants obscured the plant’s sign. The guard booth was empty and unattended, its camera unplugged, the phone number in its window unregistered. In its inner parking lot there were a few trucks with completely flat tires and broken windshields. The plant’s whole yard had gone to seed, power lines had been slashed through, vending machines in the company building were broken open and ransacked. The degradation of the site seemed like more than the toll of two motionless years. It looked like personal anger at the plant’s presence. I only encountered three people working there, who seemed to be there largely to guard against further theft and vandalism. The plant, it appeared, was dead: the plundered carcass of an industrial behemoth.
Later in the afternoon I went looking for the other plume, which is east of Birmingham in Sylvan Springs. Arriving there, I initially had trouble telling where the methane emission site could be: it seemed like a residential semi-rural suburb of Birmingham. Following Google Maps, I kept ending up at the ends of cul-de-sacs, before gated access roads. Finally, just behind one gate was a water pipeline with a nameplate: PGP Operating, the second largest natural gas producer in Alabama, and the largest in the Black Warrior Basin.
The East Birmingham plume, it turns out, is the product of a tight, sprawling network of coalbed methane extraction wells – better known as natural gas fracking sites – in the Black Warrior Basin, a large coal province that stretches into Mississippi. In a satellite view, the sprawl of access roads spreads tendril-like between residential neighborhoods, widening occasionally into drill sites. Just a few feet below the ground (and in places a few feet above) a different network of pipelines shuttles gas and water from the wells.
PGP has extracted just under a trillion cubic feet of coalbed methane, mostly from the triangle between Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, and Jasper – the very triangle with such a density of coal-related methane hotspots on our map. Many of the other largest oil and gas operators in Alabama by volume operate mainly in that triangle. Leaks are a perennial feature of fracking in the area. The plume on our map was recorded in satellite data recorded by Kayrros in 2020. A 2022 flyover analysed by Kayrros also found "mysterious methane clouds," and made state news. A pipeline operator took the fall for that plume, blaming it on a one-off equipment fire. But given the spread of plumes on our map, and the overlap with the Black Warrior Basin's profusion of methane drilling sites, it seems like a potentially long-term, system-wide problem.
The Black Warrior Basin, as a report prepared for the U.S. Dept. of Energy by the Geological Survey of Alabama puts it, is the “cradle of the modern coalbed methane industry.” In the 1970s, coal mines in the Basin started experimenting with “degasification” – pumping methane out of coal beds – as a safety issue, to avert mine explosions. By 1980, they were pumping the gas for its own sake, injecting chemical laden water and phenolic resins into coal beds to release methane and hold seams open. Since then, the basin has produced more than 2.6 trillion cubic feet of gas and 1.6 billion barrels of water.
By driving around the basin and pulling up to access roads, I finally found a PGP well. It churned its wheels, dipped its head, and pulled through its straw, uncannily animal-like – a giant mosquito sucking the blood out of the Basin, and leaving a burning rash for the Basin’s residents, flora, and fauna to suffer.
The methane emissions from the Basin are a serious problem with global consequences. But here again, as with the Bluestone site, the same social, economic, and chemical processes that lead to those emissions pose a much more immediate threat to the people who live tangled in the net of operators’ pipelines, roads, and drills, and to the environment they live in. In Alabama, natural gas operators are allowed to stream their fracking fluid straight into rivers and streams. Nelson Brooke, who works for an environmental monitoring and advocacy organization called the Black Warrior Riverkeeper and spends his days patrolling the Black Warrior River in a boat to look for signs of environmental damage, says he has come across patches of water with an oily surface sheen, as well as scenes of massive fish die-off. Fracking fluid and methane can also spill over into groundwater and wells, contaminating peoples’ drinking water; the Riverkeeper claims to have received “numerous reports” of wells gone bad.
In July of 2023, a month after my visit, the Black Warrior Riverkeeper filed a complaint against Bluestone Coke. Still idle, the plant has a permit to dump leftover wastewater into a nearby creek. According to the Riverkeeper, it has violated its permit more than 350 times by dumping illegal pollutants.
Birmingham’s history is indelible in its physical structure. Even once they seem to have been safely stowed in a world of newspaper articles, fines, and administrative proceedings, Birmingham’s polluters haunt the place, its people, its air, and its watershed. But the histories of Birmingham’s methane plumes also contain a cause for hope: the site of each of these plumes is a place where resident people have noticed, often long before it’s picked up on a satellite map, the plume’s local consequences. Struggling against entrenched political power and much greater financial resources, they have prevailed in important ways. Bluestone Coke no longer operates. The Black Warrior Riverkeeper led a successful movement to block a 2,000 acre mining project that, by its estimate, could have contaminated the drinking water of 200,000 people. Currently, Southern Environmental Law Center is threatening another lawsuit against Bluestone. This, then, might be Birmingham’s lesson: that against the insatiable economic motivations of some to extract, there will always be the irrepressible imperative of others to live. And when it becomes urgent enough, as it has in Birmingham, that imperative can be a source of real political power.
With thanks to Olivia Weeks for contributing reporting and interviews.