A global climate debate heats up as a liquefied natural gas terminal looks for a home in Chester story by kyle bagenstose
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he table was set, powerful people already gathered round and talking about the future, when Carol Kazeem walked in about 15 minutes late and popped the balloon. Kazeem, a first-term Pennsylvania state representative from Chester’s 159th district, has had a whirlwind of a year. When the former trauma outreach specialist and 31-year-old mother of three upset incumbent Brian Kirkland for the position last year, despite the Delaware County Democratic Committee and other established political machinery backing him, it signaled political winds shifting in Chester toward 8 GRID P H I L LY.CO M JU LY 2 0 23
more grassroots-oriented leaders. “It was never going to be easy because this is a machine almost 40 years in, longer than I’ve even been alive,” Kazeem told the Delco Times. Her fortitude was quickly tested again. Just a month after her upset in the primary, StateImpact Pennsylvania published a blockbuster story reporting that an energy company called Penn America Energy Holdings LLC had “quietly been shopping plans for a massive liquefied natural gas facility and export terminal in Chester along the Delaware River” to a slew of politicians, including Gov. Tom Wolf, Chester Mayor
M AT T T H E W S M I T H / F L I C K R
STEP ON THE GAS?
Thaddeus Kirkland (uncle of Kazeem’s ousted opponent) and other local powerbrokers. At the same time, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was raging, sending European nations into a panic over the security of both their physical borders and energy supplies. With the majority of the continent’s natural gas previously emanating from Russia, many Europeans were suddenly left to wonder where their next kilowatt-hour was going to come from. Some industry and political voices posited that the United States, the world’s largest natural gas producer, could act as an energy savior. But only if it exported higher volumes of its copious supplies of natural gas. To do so, the nation would need to build more facilities capable of super-cooling gas to negative 260 degrees Fahrenheit, thus liquifying it for easier transport by ship across the Atlantic. State Rep. Martina White, Philadelphia’s lone Republican representative to Harrisburg hailing from the far Northeast, was on board. Legislation she introduced — passed by the General Assembly in April 2022 and signed