OAK HALL, Va. — Some folks in Accomack County are pushing back against a proposal to drill thousands of feet underground to store chicken waste, citing concerns about drinking water and public health.
The company Vaulted Deep is considering placing the drill on a piece of land in Oak Hall, but opposition was strong during an Eastern Shore of Virginia Ground Water Committee meeting held Tuesday. The meeting drew a packed crowd, and no one spoke in favor of the project.
Vaulted Deep, a waste management company based in Houston, Texas, specializes in permanently storing organic material, including poultry waste, deep underground. The method, the company says, supports clean land, air, and water by removing “end of life” carbon that can produce methane and pollution.
Concerns centered on the potential risks of storing chicken waste near groundwater sources that supply drinking water to the area.
“I don't even want my grandmother's chicken soup coming out of my water tap, much less the stuff that comes out of the other end of the chicken,” Andy Teeling, a neighbor from Painter, Virginia, told WBOC.
The waste, according to Vaulted, is stored in a porous layer of rock sealed between two non-permeable layers - roughly 5,000 feet below the surface.
Vaulted says the proposed site would dispose of dissolved air flotation waste created when animal processing facilities treat their wastewater. DAF systems create an organic slurry as fats, oils, grease, and suspended solids are removed from the water. Elsewhere on Delmarva, DAF byproduct is often kept in large storage tanks.
Vaulted Deep’s proposal would avoid the common complaints surrounding DAF tanks, according to Morille, including the often-offensive smell they emit. Morille says once waste is received from a poultry farm, the Vaulted Deep facility immediately injects it into the earth, reducing the possibility of lingering odors.
However, the committee still expressed concerns about the area's aquifer.
“The consequences of a contamination event would be catastrophic to the public health and the local economy,” committee member Paul Grossman said at Tuesday's meeting.
Members of the Groundwater Committee shared those concerns and unanimously voted on a measure opposing the project. The committee recommended that state and county leaders not move forward with the proposal, a decision met with applause after the motion carried.
Steve Lawson, another resident of Virginia's Eastern Shore, also expressed concern over the proposal.
“The Groundwater Committee is doing exactly the right thing,” Lawson said. “Deep well injection of animal waste doesn't have a commercial precedent anywhere else in the world. Everywhere else they produce pellet fertilizer, pellet fuel, and methane gas at commercial scale.”
Worries were also shared by the Accomack County Farm Bureau.
"The amount of material they'd be pumping into the ground, if anything were ever to go wrong, it's too late," President Matt Hickman told WBOC. "Once something has happened and it's contaminated the aquifer, there's no going back. We have families that live here, and we want to make sure it's protected for our lifetimes and for our children's lifetimes."
When asked about an alternative, Hickman said farmers currently utilize chicken waste in their fields.
“And all of that is regulated, tested,” Hickman said. “We follow nutrient management plans, it's utilized for fertilizer for the crop use of that year.”
Under current Accomack County zoning laws, a drill like the one proposed by Vaulted Deep is not permitted. The company says it is working to appeal those rules.
The proposal has also drawn attention from state lawmakers. Delegate Rob Bloxom, who represents Virginia's 100th District, said a team is drafting legislation that would ban drills like this from groundwater protection areas in Virginia, including the Eastern Shore. He said the goal is to protect fragile groundwater resources but noted the legislation is still in its early stages.