After overcoming public opposition in 2022 and a legal challenge last year, a controversial natural gas project is operational in Surry County.

Align RNG, a joint venture of Dominion Energy and Smithfield Foods, received Surry supervisors’ 2-1 approval in 2022 to construct a regional processing facility that would turn methane from hog manure, also known as biogas, into pipeline-quality natural gas. The facility is planned to be a regional hub for participating Smithfield Foods farms in Surry, Isle of Wight, Sussex and Southampton counties.

“The facility began operating in April and everything is going really well so far,” said Aaron Ruby, a spokesman for Dominion.

Not all of the project’s neighbors agree.

“I was hoping for the best when it started up but with sadness it is not to be,” former Dendron District Supervisor Michael Drewry, who’d cast the lone dissenting vote on the project in 2022, wrote in an Aug. 14 email to county supervisors.

“The industrial plant is clearly audible at our home located about one-half to three-quarter mile(s) away,” Drewry wrote. “For rural folks, it sounds like your neighbor’s grain dryer running. The difference is a grain dryer runs only during harvest season.”

Another nearby resident, Abram Ketchum, wrote to supervisors on Aug. 15 complaining of a “constant loud noise coming from this facility 24 hours a day.”

The county received a third noise complaint from David Lobur on Aug. 16.

“Currently, the foliage is thick and lush, creating a natural noise reduction, yet the sound is still disruptive. Unfortunately, in the fall and winter months, without the foliage, the noise will likely be loud enough to hear indoors and be sleep disruptive,” Lobur wrote.

Ruby said Align is aware of the complaints and is investigating.

“We began commissioning the facility in April, and this is the first complaint we’ve heard,” Ruby said. “The facility is surrounded by dense trees and vegetation, and we’ve installed sound buffers to minimize any noise. It should not be disruptive to our neighbors.”

Four weeks after the June 2, 2022, county vote, a group of Surry residents opposed to the project traveled more than 40 miles to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission’s Fort Monroe headquarters in hopes of stopping it at the state level by speaking against a then-proposed 65-mile pipeline network connecting farms to the site, which cross the Blackwater River and two swamps at seven locations in Surry, Isle of Wight, Sussex and Southampton counties. But the VMRC’s nine-member board unanimously approved the company’s proposal.

Drewry resigned from office in July of that year a week after filing a complaint that asked Surry County’s Circuit Court to declare the board’s vote “null and void” on grounds that the county Planning Commission allegedly neglected to give the written notice required under state law to all owners of abutting properties. Four landowners in neighboring Sussex County, Drewry’s complaint alleged, didn’t receive the required notice ahead of the commission’s Nov. 21, 2021, vote to recommend the project’s approval.

Retired Judge James Hawks, who heard arguments from Drewry and attorneys representing the county and Align in April 2023, ruled in May of that year that Drewry lacked “standing” to bring his complaint on grounds that it was “not in dispute that he attended and participated in the various meetings preceding” the June 2, 2022, vote.

Drewry, a practicing attorney who represented himself in court, had claimed the Align RNG hub would bring air and noise pollution to his nearby farm, citing the company’s 2021 settling of a lawsuit with Clean Aire NC, a North Carolina-based environmental group, over alleged violations of that state’s air quality regulations at a similar processing facility at the border of Dublin and Sampson counties. Align had argued the Surry facility’s carbon dioxide and methane emissions would be “minimal” and “non-toxic.”

When hog manure breaks down, it emits methane, a component of natural gas that’s also a greenhouse gas. To keep methane out of the atmosphere, participating farmers use anaerobic digesters and covered lagoons to pipe it to the regional facility for processing.

There, the collected gas passes through membranes to remove hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide, leaving a 99% pure product that can be fed into an existing natural gas pipeline intersecting the site.

According to Align, the reduction in greenhouse gasses from participating farms at the Surry site is projected to be roughly equivalent to taking 22,000 vehicles off the road. An estimated 12 tons of extracted carbon dioxide would be re-released into the atmosphere every year, and company officials, during Align’s hotly debated request for a conditional use permit, acknowledged that not all the extracted hydrogen sulfide would be turned into solid sulfur and hauled away. The amount that escapes is fed into a thermal oxidizer, essentially an incinerator, where heat transforms the gas into the estimated 8 tons of less-harmful sulfur dioxide the facility is estimated to emit per year.

Ruby last year said even though Align’s Surry site would serve 20 farms, compared to the 19 served by the North Carolina facility, the Surry site would produce less than two-thirds of the amount of biogas as the North Carolina project, and would use different technology aimed at generating fewer emissions.