• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

LNG Terminal Hearing Today; Liquefied Natural Gas Facility Proposed on Lower Columbia River

Posted on: Friday, 30 September 2005, 15:01 CDT

By JOSEPH B. FRAZIER Associated Press writer

PORTLAND -- Columbia River residents get a chance today to express hopes and fears about a liquefied natural gas import terminal proposed for Bradwood Landing, an abandoned lumber mill site about 28 miles upriver from the Pacific Ocean.

Northern Star Natural Gas wants to start building the facility in 2007 and have it operational by 2010.

Proponents note that natural gas is clean, efficient and abundant and will be increasingly in demand for everything from power plants to residential use as the region grows.

Opponents worry about a catastrophic explosion, that the storage tanks and the massive ships that deliver the gas would be targets for terrorist attacks and that the security that will go with them would change the nature and uses of the river.

Today's hearing will allow the public to tell the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission about environmental factors they think should be considered before a permit is issued.

The Bradwood site is among four proposed on the lower river by four separate companies. Two of the others are near Astoria, the fourth upriver near Clatskanie. A fifth has been proposed for the Coos Bay area.

The only such terminals in the United States now are in Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and Massachusetts, but more than 50 others are in various stages of planning.

The new national energy bill gives the federal energy commission exclusive authority to approve or deny an application although the states can intervene under some circumstances.

In the past two years the commission has not denied an application but has approved eight new projects and the expansions of four that already exist.

The Portland-based Northern Star is the furthest along in the permit process of the five proposed Oregon sites. today's event will be the federal officials' first public forum on an Oregon proposal.

Northern Star made a prefiling in February to start the formal review process, said Kent Craford, a company spokesman.

The agency is expected to issue a draft environmental impact statement in February, kicking off a lengthy hearings process.

Each week two or three ships the length of three football fields would cross the Columbia River bar, among the world's trickiest, with shipments of liquefied natural gas cooled to about 260 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

It will be offloaded into huge tanks holding a total of 7 billion cubic feet of gas in reduced liquid form.

When it is regassified by warming, an estimated 1.5 billion cubic feet a day would pass through a 35-mile pipeline under the Columbia to a main line along the Washington shore of the river.

When gassified, the substance takes up about 610 times the volume it does in its frozen state.

Federal officials say the substance cannot burn in a frozen form, and if there are leaks it can burn only within a narrow concentration, between 5 and 15 percent of the atmosphere. Outside those limits it would be too diluted to ignite, lacking the necessary oxygen to do so.

The industry has an admirable safety record. The only blotch came in 1944 when a poorly designed tank exploded in Cleveland, leveling a square mile of the city and killing 128 people.

There was another fatal accident last year in Algeria.

Opposition to similar projects has scuttled them in Maine, California and Alabama, and the lower Columbia River has its share of opponents.

But in Astoria three opponents of a proposed facility at Warrenton at the river's mouth ran for seats on the Port of Astoria Commission in May, hoping to scrap the project there. They were defeated.

On the river's Puget Island, Wash., the nearest population center to the proposed site, Wahkiakum Friends of the River was formed to fight the Bradwood project.

Co-chairman Judy Bright said residents fear it will interrupt fishing and boating and expose the area to a possible terrorist attack.

Washington's Wahkiakum County has no hospital, she told The Oregonian newspaper.

"All emergency responders are volunteers," she said. "Our health department has a staff of four people. On Puget Island, there are two ways out -- the ferry, which lands very close to Bradwood on the Oregon side, and a narrow bridge.

"But the reality is, if there was an accident, there wouldn't be time to evacuate anyway."

Source: Columbian

More News in this Category