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Perspectives, Part 1: Community Responses to the Department of Energy’s Community Benefits Process

CBPs are no longer about being reactive.
—Amanda Woodrum, ReImagine Appalachia

The “Perspectives, Part 1” session highlighted the voices of those who have worked directly within their communities to deliver benefits from new energy infrastructure projects. The panelists represented community-based organizations and nonprofits. Several panelists had been working on developing and negotiating various kinds of community benefits frameworks for decades, and their organizations have developed community benefits plans (CBPs) for recent multimillion-dollar projects awarded by the federal government. The panel was moderated by Margaret Cook, deputy director of Climate Equity and Resilience at the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC). Panel speakers included Amanda Woodrum from Reimagine Appalachia, Elizabeth Kocs from GTI Energy, Jane Fleming Kleeb from Bold Alliance, and Jennifer Hadayia from Air Alliance Houston.

COMMUNITY VOICES AND EXPERIENCE

Cook asked the panelists to share their perspectives on the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) CBP process and invited them to share more about themselves and their work. Before turning to the panel, Cook explained that HARC is a sustainability-focused nonprofit with expertise in air, energy, water, climate, and geospatial issues that hosts a climate equity program, which is a cross-cutting initiative. In this way, HARC concentrates its efforts on restorative justice, a practice that involves mitigating risks and remediating harms that have occurred over time. HARC is one of the partner organizations and the engagement lead of the HyVelocity Hydrogen Hub in the Houston, Texas, region. In that role, the organization is responsible for the project’s CBP.

Kleeb shared that Bold Alliance started as Bold Nebraska but has grown to include nine states and serves the entire country. Bold Alliance has primarily been involved in pipeline infrastructure projects as community advocates focused on organizing landowners into legal co-ops (called easement action teams) to protect their property rights and help them with legal challenges. It also organizes the Pipeline Fighters Hub, which helps communities by providing a variety of resources such as monthly webinars, presence on the ground, and a new program called Energy Builders designed to help negotiate rural CBAs and dividend agreements. Kleeb used Tallgrass as an example, a carbon pipeline company aiming to convert a natural gas pipeline for its operations. The impacted community wanted the old pipeline to be decommissioned, as well as to receive a dividend from decommissioning, and it did not consider the first easement payment sufficient. The community also wanted more transparency about public safety. In response, Bold Alliance started conversations with Tallgrass, which was willing to work with them to negotiate with landowners and strengthen their community benefits process.

Kocs shared that in her role as program manager at GTI Energy, a research and development (R&D) nonprofit, she focuses on energy and environmental justice. Her team works on projects related to hydrogen, geothermal, carbon management, industrial decarbonization, and energy efficiency R&D. Currently her team has 14 active CBPs and 18 in the award negotiation stage. Kocs noted that GTI Energy is also involved in the HyVelocity, Midwest, and Appalachian Hydrogen Hubs. She also serves as the energy equity officer for the Midwest Hydrogen Hub project. She underscored that one of the biggest challenges across all projects has been the moving target of community benefits as DOE refined and updated its process over the past few years.

Woodrum is the co-director of Reimagine Appalachia, which is a four-state coalition of diverse stakeholders representing environment, faith communities, local government, and labor groups. They work in the Ohio River Valley region of Appalachia, one of the coal communities in the United States. She shared that their work with CBAs started as a reaction to bad economic development practices, where low-bid contracting, not caring about impacts on the environment, and bringing in out-of-state cheap labor were common practices. She also highlighted that while DOE’s practices may not be perfect, they did not exist 2 years ago. She believes that the progress made over this time is monumental.

Hadayia, the executive director of Air Alliance Houston, shared that it is the oldest advocacy nonprofit in the Houston-Harris County area with a singular focus on air quality. It focuses on campaigns on all major sources of air pollution, which in the Houston area includes industrial sources like petrochemicals, refineries, concrete, and transportation emissions. It creates avenues for fence-line and frontline communities impacted by air pollution to have a meaningful place in environmental decision-making, ranging from permit decisions to rulemaking

to decisions on energy investments. Hadayia discussed that much of what we see as the community benefits process today started in the mid-1980s with citizen advisory councils (CACs) bringing industries and communities together.

IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES

Cook asked the panel about the challenges to actually implementing a CBP. Woodrum highlighted that CBPs are the responsibility of the developer or the project applicant, despite having originally served as an avenue to push back on the developer’s potential negative impacts. She noted that as a community organizer, she does not want to leave it up to the developers to decide the details. Therefore, her organization and its partners are designing a set of community benefit principles across their four-state region in Appalachia. Woodrum emphasized that community benefits frameworks are no longer about being reactive but about being proactive, as they are now a part of policies like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

The Role of Participatory Research and Capacity Building

Woodrum continued that as part of Reimagine Appalachia’s organizational strategy, they conduct participatory action research to co-create or co-produce knowledge with communities. This includes listening sessions, focus groups, and conversations. In the end, they add everything to a Google Doc to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to add their thoughts and voices to the plan. Woodrum noted that this simple action makes the project better, builds relationships, and gets people engaged with the project.

Woodrum highlighted three ways of engaging workers from disadvantaged communities (e.g., those living in high-poverty census tracts) in new projects: learning from example CBPs and CBAs across the country in various industries, understanding apprenticeship requirements, and offering paid on-the-job training opportunities. She discussed the Missouri Model, where a percent of project dollars is set aside and used to support activities like a community benefit advisory board. The community labor training partnership offered by regional offices of the Ohio Urban League is an effective example of best practices. She emphasized that such activities require capacity building, and it would be most effective if some amount was set aside in every CBP to support activities such as a community advisory board and community labor training partnerships.

Working with Many Stakeholders and Allies

Kleeb continued to share her experience with the Tallgrass carbon dioxide pipeline conversion project, which would convert the Trailblazer natural gas pipeline to an approximately 400-mile CO₂ transportation system, allowing for the capture, transport, and permanent sequestration of CO₂ from industries across Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming. At least 12 organizations, including the farm bureau, the corn ethanol board, and some agriculture-based groups did not want to participate in the project. Bold Alliance worked with these groups to make them aware of the associated benefits and their rights. The pipeline project would pay landowners about 10 cents per metric ton of carbon injected. For the scale of the project, that would amount to significant payments to landowners, on the order of millions in some cases. Kleeb and her team ensured that there was better public education around these sizeable benefits. During the process, they received feedback that there was insufficient engagement with tribes in the region; they are now working on ensuring that tribes can access any public funds created from the project. In response to criticism from their environmental justice counterparts for partnering with a pipeline company, Bold Alliance has expanded efforts to explain to their allies why the Tallgrass project is unique, and how the developer is willing to work with communities and be held accountable.

Building Trust

Kocs underscored that the biggest challenge is trust. She said that communities often do not trust developers, companies, or DOE. The lack of trust stems from all the unknown information in the field and everything in the process that is still being designed and developed. Because of their mistrust, communities often believe everything is already decided and that community perspectives will not matter in final decision-making. Communities also do not understand why the federal government is investing in technologies like carbon management or hydrogen. She recommended that a broader educational campaign from DOE would help communities understand why these federal investments are happening in different regions. She continued that these campaigns should not be one size fits all and must be careful to align community priorities with a potential project.

Hadayia added that often the concepts and locations of new projects have already been decided, and communities have had no opportunity to share their input. She emphasized that “this creates a trust deficit in communities.” She continued that when the location of such projects has been decided without any community input, developers often assume that communities will be willing to host the project and be welcoming toward it. Such an implicit assumption of community consent by developers and policymakers is not real community-led consent and further impedes the building of trust. She also highlighted that in

some cases recommendations from groups like the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC) and the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) have been ignored. DOE has the opportunity to fix this imbalance of power and award projects that include monitoring and oversight. Hadayia continued that CACs have played a tremendous role in ensuring community safety and have been responsible for sharing raw environmental data, allowing communities unfettered access to important information. In this way, CACs have been neutral facilitators of the process. However, she lamented the lack of capacity and funding for such neutral facilitators. Like Woodrum, Hadayia advocated for better funding for such organizations and for developers to come forward and acknowledge past harms as a way of building trust.

Woodrum continued that the community benefits movement was aimed at making bad projects less bad. She believes that the current opportunity allows growth beyond that—to make good projects even better, as was discussed in the previous panel. She shared the example of Reimagine Your Community, which hosts a showcase and invites labor, faith, environment, and other community leaders to discuss project ideas and then apply for funding. Its goal is to primarily include those groups that are often left out of conversations on community benefits and collaborate on the vision and goal for four to six fundable projects that these stakeholders would like to see for their communities. She noted a three-pronged process that includes developing the vision together, building trust, and delivering the community benefits of the projects, and called it a “win-win-win.”

Kleeb echoed that trust and trust-building are very important for her organization. Accountability, transparency, and respect are critical in the process. She highlighted that it is equally important to be upfront about the risks associated with a project. Tallgrass, for example, was transparent about what would happen if the pipeline exploded, or leaked, and what that would mean for a community within a 3-mile area of the project. An annual first responder training that included a curriculum built with landowners and the fire marshal, based on plume modeling, was included in the CBP. Being informed about these public safety risks, and having safety measures in place, helped the community build trust in the developer. The negotiated agreement also helped the community of landowners to avoid receiving a compensation as a one-time payment of about $75,000 to $100,000 from the developer. A one-time payment of such scale is usually a huge tax burden for middle-class families. Instead, the CBP advocated for yearly payments to help with the tax burden. Bold Alliance was also able to build greater trust with the landowners by advocating for better easement terms that would be valid even if the pipeline was sold to another company or if a landowner decided that it was easier for them to not have the pipeline removed from their property at the time of decommissioning.

DISCUSSION

Cook asked the panel to share concluding thoughts on the community benefits process and what is needed to prepare better for new energy infrastructure projects. Kocs advocated for better guidance from DOE and, broadly, the federal government, on how community members can receive stipends for participating in advisory councils. Hadayia added that federal agencies like DOE and the Environmental Protection Agency need to work with local agencies on enforcement and accountability. Kleeb emphasized that all stakeholders must remember that the objective of a community benefits framework is to create new clean energy benefits for impacted communities, and for developers to do right by these communities. Woodrum concluded the panel by sharing that this opportunity is bigger than addressing environmental impacts—it is also about addressing past harms from racism, building pathways out of poverty into new jobs, and sharing best practices for combining economic development practices with workforce development practices. She said, “If we get this right, we are at a moment in time where we will change the way we do economic development and move it towards those win-win-win approaches. I think if we do this right, everyone is at the table.”