Ohio state, local leaders have no knowledge of ‘world’s largest’ natural gas plant

By David Beasley
The Center Square

A massive natural gas electric power plant planned for southern Ohio announced by the Trump administration this month caught state and local leaders by surprise.

The $33 billion plant would be the “largest natural gas generation project in the world,”the U.S. Department of Commerce announced on Feb. 17 as one component of a new trade deal with Japan.

The plant is expected to be in the “vicinity of Portsmouth,” the Commerce Department said.

That was news to the mayor of Portsmouth Charlotte Gordon.

“I wasn’t privy to these discussions,” Gordon told The Center Square. “I started calling some of the people I thought should know and they didn’t know.”

The same is true for the office of Gov. Mike DeWine.

“We do not have any information on this,” DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney told The Center Square.

Gordon believes the project would be built on federal land at a former uranium enrichment plant, called the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, in nearby Pike County.

The plant was originally built in 1952 to provide enriched uranium for weapons and nuclear power plants, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

“Uranium enrichment activities at Portsmouth concluded in May 2001,” the Energy Department’s website says.

In 2011, a private company – now called Centrus Energy Corp. – that had leased the Portsmouth facility, returned it to the U.S. Department of Energy for “decontamination and decommissioning,” according to DOE.

“It’s a large amount of land,” Gordon said. “I do believe that is the site of this [gas power plant] project.”

The U.S. Department of Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 Although the city of Portsmouth, which has a population of about 18,000, would welcome the jobs from the gas plant, it is doing well without it, the mayor said.

“We’re building a state-of-the art water plant and we’re actually selling water to the northern part of Kentucky across the Ohio river,” Gordon said. “Their wells have been contaminated and the Environmental Protection Agency shut down their wells.”

There are also plans for a new riverfront development.

“We are right now going through a really wonderful renaissance,” she said.