A fuel cell that would convert coal mine methane into electricity might be coming to the old Twin Valley High School property in Buchanan County, employees of Diversified Energy said this week at a community meeting. But it’s not clear where the power would go.
The first phase would include the construction of one fuel cell, about the size of two 18-wheeler box trailers, and would provide 1.6 megawatts of power, company employees said. Phase one of the project is planned for the sports fields and flat lands surrounding the school, which closed when officials consolidated four high schools to form Southern Gap High School, which opened this year.
Twin Valley’s proximity to Coronado’s coal mine in Oakwood would create access to the natural gas, said Jonathan Hess, a project engineer for the company.
Diversified Energy, a company that produces natural gas and oil, acquired a number of gas wells in a leasehold in Buchanan County in 2025, he said.
The project would create 10 to 20 jobs in the area and provide lower power costs for industrial customers, Hess said. No details about those customers have been released.
At the meeting, residents who live near the community of Pilgrim’s Knob, where the property is, raised concerns about more industry use of the region’s natural gas while residents and businesses remain unable to tap the resource.
The project can be scaled up and could become larger, said Hess and Jeff Cooper, a member of the county board of supervisors and a production manager for the company. Fuel cells can be stacked like Lego blocks, Hess said.
He added that the plan for the project is to supply the power back to Diversified’s facilities, but that could change if new opportunities arise for other industries or the county’s public service authority.
Cooper said there is the potential for the company to provide electricity to nearby mines or to a future business that could be housed at the former school. Hess said if the company acquires the property, it would want to look at repurposing the old school or “grow[ing] the project to utilize that square footage.”
In March 2025, Diversified Energy, based in Birmingham, Alabama, announced a collaboration to “address the urgent needs of data centers by supplying as much as 360 megawatts of electricity to three distinct locations in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky,” power that would be supplied from natural gas and captured coal mine methane, according to a news release.
The locations were not disclosed in the release, and Hess referred questions from Cardinal News to Douglas Kris, also an employee of Diversified Energy. Kris said he could not comment on where the power would go because the project is in its very early stages.
He said supplying power to data centers is “one potential opportunity out there” among many. He did not say whether attracting a data center developer to the area is a possibility or if it would be a power purchase agreement for data centers located elsewhere.
“There is an opportunity to take legacy emissions from coal mines that would normally be emitted into the atmosphere, capturing [those] and using that to create power or electricity,” he said, adding later, “There’s a lot of property available in that area. It’s a fairly rural area, and I think property owners are eager to get some economic benefit from the land down there.”
Community meeting raises a long-asked question: Should local residents have access to the county’s natural gas?
About 50 people, many local to the area surrounding the old school, filed into the Whitewood Community Center on Tuesday night to learn more about the project. Several residents asked how it would benefit the community and whether the project would impact the quality of life in the area. Questions were also asked about the impact to property values and the environment.
Despite the abundance of natural gas, homes and businesses in Buchanan County have little access to it, a reality across Southwest Virginia. Natural gas from the coalfield counties is transported elsewhere, while people who live next to those pipelines can’t use it to heat their homes. Buchanan County produces about half of the natural gas that’s in the state of Virginia, according to numbers from 2022.
“I understand that you’re going to try to decrease the power bills for industry, but what are you going to do for us plain people?” asked Christine Cole, the first resident to step up to the lectern. She said she has been talking to Cooper for several years about bringing natural gas to residents in the community.
During the meeting, Cooper said the project could help bring natural gas to residents’ homes in the future. He said he recently asked the county’s public service authority board, which provides water and sewer to residents, to begin the process of becoming a gas and electric authority as well.
This is a separate initiative from the Diversified Energy project, Cooper, who serves on the public service authority board, said in an interview after the meeting.
“It was not the intent of the meeting to turn to natural gas in homes,” he said. “But with that said, the meeting went there because the public wants gas in their home.”
People in the county use propane tanks, electric heat, wood and coal to heat their homes, Cooper said, and having access through the authority would bring down their electricity costs. Appalachian Power Co., which serves Buchanan County, has increased rates over the years.
An initiative like this would be intensive and involve getting state approval, Cooper said, along with improving infrastructure to treat the gas before it enters people’s homes. The public service authority is not in any active negotiations with Diversified about using natural gas resources or the prospective electricity through this project, Cooper said.
Other residents, some who live next door to the property, asked about noise and emissions from the project. In Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s energy plan, fuel cells are described as a form of non-combustion gas resources that, compared to conventional gas generation, “produce substantially lower local emissions of pollutants … reducing health impacts in nearby communities, particularly communities that have been disproportionately affected by energy infrastructure.”
“We’ve got numerous projects in the region that are in front of houses and homes,” Hess said on Tuesday. “We just don’t have any problems, because we do our homework.”
He said sound and light emissions would be absorbed by the project, and the public service authority would be upgraded to meet water demands. There would be jobs through the construction phase and high-paying careers for people, he said, and a severance tax to benefit the county, which has lost severance tax revenue due to the downturn of the coal industry in recent years.
Cooper said the county would not invest any money into the project. Hess said Diversified Energy applied for a federal grant to help pay for it, which has not yet been awarded.
A public hearing to convey the school property to the county’s industrial development authority will be held at the next board of supervisors meeting, Nov. 3 at 6 p.m. at the government center in Grundy.
From there, the property could become Diversified Energy’s through a purchase agreement with the authority, said Jeremey Ward, the director of the county IDA. Ward said a price has not been discussed at this point.
