The town of Brookfield is leading another challenge to a tentative state decision approving a natural gas expansion project that would increase the volume of gas flowing through Connecticut to the New York metropolitan area. The town’s opposition — along with that of its backers in the environmental movement — is directed at an application by pipeline operator Iroquois Gas Transmission System to install two additional compressors at an existing station in Brookfield in order to increase gas flow by something less than 10 percent without having to expand the size of the pipeline. Brookfield’s concern — there has been local opposition of some sort since the compressor station was built two decades ago — is whether the operation of the new, gas-fired compressors will produce emissions with unhealthy levels of airborne pollutants such as greenhouse gases and contributors to higher ozone levels. The local fight is taking place amid a wider and increasingly political debate over what role — if any — natural gas has in the New England scheme of energy generation, where demand is forecast to increase and electric rates continue to rise. Gas advocates argue it is a relatively clean, plentiful and inexpensive fuel and pipeline access to New England should be expanded. Critics have written it off as an unhealthy, climate-damaging fossil fuel.
Proposed CT gas line project roils new debate. It’s amid politics over role of natural gas in energy
