Question of Natural Gas Ban Looms Over Aquidneck Island
August 29, 2025
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PORTSMOUTH, R.I. — Is it time for Aquidneck Island to give up natural gas?
It’s a question state regulators have been considering this year, one that’s been simmering in the background since an island-wide natural gas outage in 2019, and it’s one of the goals of the Act on Climate.
Members of the state Energy Facility Siting Board have been holding public comment sessions on a proposal to ban new hookups of natural gas on the island. So far the board has held public comment sessions in Newport, Middletown and Portsmouth.
The proposal is something of a compromise. In August 2024, state energy regulators re-issued their approval of a liquified natural gas (LNG) storage and vaporization facility on Old Mill Lane in Portsmouth. At the time, the EFSB accepted the argument from Rhode Island Energy that the facility was key to providing a backup source of natural gas in the event of another island-wide outage, like the one in early 2019 that led to the facility in the first place.
Residents living near Old Mill Lane, however, opposed the facility’s re-approval. For years, residents complained the facility was a bad neighbor, emitting air pollution, noise pollution, and light pollution, in addition to some members of the public expressing safety concerns living so close to a LNG facility.
As part of its approval, the EFSB pledged it would explore a moratorium on new gas hookups on Aquidneck Island only, a long-time request for state environmental groups, and at one time, the Portsmouth Town Council, which requested one via resolution not long after the Old Mill Lane facility went online.
But support on the Town Council has faded away, with several council members recently expressing their opposition to the moratorium. Town Council president Keith Hamilton told council members he thought the LNG facility at Old Mill Lane in Portsmouth was unacceptable, but a moratorium would harm town residents at a time when electricity rates were still too high.
“Top of the list would be getting rid of the peak shaving facility,” Hamilton said. “To enable that we would have to have a secondary pipeline onto this island, creating a loop so that the system doesn’t starve from one side. That would entail not having a moratorium because it would hamstring our residents.”
Councilor David Gleason agreed, calling the Old Mill Lane facility “just a Band-Aid.”
“You’re not going to stop the growth of gas,” said Gleason.
It’s not an uncommon sentiment on the island. In its written testimony on the ban, the Greater Newport Chamber of Commerce warned the EFSB a natural gas moratorium would “hurt our competitiveness, impede our efforts to grow our economy and add jobs.”
“A moratorium could deter new commercial and industrial developments, potentially pushing it off the Island or out of state, leading to lost economic revenue totaling $232 million based on the value of known projects currently in the pipeline,” wrote Erin Donovan-Boyle, the chamber’s president and CEO.
But the proceedings have attracted wide support for the moratorium across the state, beyond just residents of Aquidneck Island’s three towns, with many focusing on the need to reduce emissions and meet the goals of the Act on Climate. Green Energy Consumers Alliance wrote that “every new hookup increases strain on the existing system and the risk for another capacity shortfall.”
“As an island, we should be especially motivated to eliminate our reliance on fossil fuels in order to protect our communities from sea level rise, increased flooding and other impacts,” wrote Newport resident Emily Conklin. “A moratorium on natural gas would be a huge step in the right direction.”
A frozen valve in early 2019 showed how vulnerable Aquidneck Island residents were in the existing natural gas pipeline. The island experienced a severe drop in pressure, leading to thousands of residents in Newport, Middletown and Portsmouth without natural gas for heat in the middle of winter for multiple days.
A big reason for the pressure failure that January was there is only one pipeline that natural gas travels through before it’s distributed to island residents, but it’s not enough to keep up with the island’s demand. EFSB chair Ron Gerwatowski said in an EFSB hearing last year, “There’s just not enough capacity there to keep the gas flowing and heating during the winter.”
Hence the approval of temporary LNG infrastructure at Old Mill Lane, which is likely to stay, as EFSB officials noted, through the end of the decade, if not longer. Regardless of the EFSB’s final decision, the state is still working through its own investigation into the future of natural gas in Rhode Island.
The natural gas investigation, which has been ongoing for two and a half years, is far from over, with the stakeholder report delayed multiple times this year.
To clarify: A moratorium would not affect existing gas customers. It would alleviate the strain of bringing on new gas customers, at a cost to all gas customers. Larry Chretien, Green Energy Consumers Alliance
States like NY recently put this restriction on new builds in the northern parts of the state.
Now the state is shirt on energy as it does not have the power within their grids. All parties government to activist need to stop with agendas that take individual choices on what energy they find best away.
This article states the economic fall out taking gas away from the island.
Businesses go where economically it’s sound and where energy choices are available ..
so stop all this blathering of who’s right or wrong. No one has the actual facts on climate! It’s theory and fact created on that.
CO2 is less than 1% of the climate gases that makes up the atmosphere. It’s needed to grow or green forests foods etc.
No one voted for wind farms off our coast .. the billions it’s costing and for a 20 year life span. The damage it’s already caused to the coast line .
“No one has the actual facts on climate!”
Nonsense.
The glaciers everywhere are disappearing at accelerating rates measured by competent science. The seas are warming at accelerating rates measured by competent science. Our principal greenhouse gases, CO2 and methane are increasing at accelerating rates measured by competent science. Ballpark observation by ordinary people, such as those who skate or fish on natural ice here in Rhode Island, confirm these trends. (Rhode Island would not have become a national presence in the game of hockey, for example, if the rate—the rate—of climate warming we’ve experience in the first twenty five years of this century were the rate of warming in the first twenty five years of the last century. Ice fishing would experience the same.) Yes, in the short term, natural gas is going to remain the go-to home heating fuel, and the authorities on Aquidneck Island certainly realize that and will approve this facility’s extension. But in the long term we simply is no future for our grandchildren if we do not follow the science instead of the political fantasy being peddled today in the largest economy on the planet.
No new fossil fuel infrastructure whatsoever if we want a livable planet
I am betting that most homeowners and businesses just want a reliable source of energy.