Penn Township residents concerned about proposed natural gas compressor
PENN TWP — Township residents packed the municipal building on Tuesday, Oct. 20, to express their opposition to a proposed project planned to be constructed in an area near residents’ homes.
A natural gas compressor station planned for a 59-acre parcel along Royal Oak Road, if built, would be operated by MarkWest, which maintains a natural gas processing plant on Hartmann Road in Jackson Township.
At Tuesday night’s meeting, Penn Township’s planning commission voted to table its evaluation of the compressor plans.
“We recently received some new documents that I got in my email this afternoon,” said planning commission member Nannette Rau. “We really didn’t have enough time and we really want to be able to dig into these documents thoroughly.”
That didn’t stop residents from expressing their frustration with the proposal. Many of those residents live in proximity to where the project would be built and were concerned about the compressor’s potential impact.
“This is ridiculous. This is literally in my backyard,” said Melissa Wirtz, who lives a short distance from the proposed site. “I’m sitting on my back porch and I’m going to be looking at a compressor plant. … They’re squeezing it into an area that it shouldn’t fall into.”
“I would like you to just ask yourself, would you like this in your backyard?” said Katie Gemperlein. “Every one of you would not want this in your backyard. This is a beautiful neighborhood. I’ve lived here for … almost longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. I’ve raised my daughter there. … I just don’t even know how you can live with yourself, MarkWest, knowing that you’re ruining a neighborhood.”
Although she is a Penn Township resident, Gemperlein attended the raucous meeting earlier this month on Forward Township’s proposed data center out of solidarity for that township’s residents.
If built, the compressor station would take natural gas from PennEnergy wells across Butler County and compress it by boosting its pressure from 100 psi to 900 psi before transporting it to the MarkWest plant.
Gemperlein, who found out about both the data center and Penn Township’s proposed gas compressor around the same time, doesn’t believe that townships are doing enough to prevent developers from intruding on green space.
“I just feel like there’s been there’s so much industrialization going on in beautiful farmland in Butler County,” Gemperlein said. “It makes us sad that our townships aren’t able to protect the residents because of past ordinances and I wish that they would be more proactive.”
Representatives from both MarkWest and Gateway Engineers declined to comment after Tuesday night’s meeting.
