WELCOME TO GASTORIA!
How the economic boon promised by liquefied natural gas would bring mega-tankers, terror alerts and environmental threats to the Columbia River.
BY NICK BUDNICK
9/28/2005
nbudnick at wweek.com
One recent evening in a small concrete building in Astoria, 10 people-many sporting Birkenstocks and munching on apples and chocolate cookies-sat watching Mel Gibson as Mad Max in The Road Warrior. The film, a cult favorite for its graphic violence, might seem a strange one for granola types to watch. But the larger message of the movie, the apocalyptic scenes of a world that has run out of oil, had the group transfixed.
"Without fuel, they were nothing," the narrator intoned in a somber introduction. "They'd built a house of straw ... Machines sputtered and stopped. Their world crumbled."
"It's a stupid movie," observed Tom Duncan, a family doctor who organized the viewing. But the symbolism of a society gone mad in pursuit of dwindling petrol supplies is, Duncan believes, a message that has significance today in Oregon's northwest corner.
The trim, gray-haired Duncan does not fancy himself a hunky hero à la Mad Max. But he does believe his group is battling the overwhelming forces of the global energy industry, forces he says threaten to turn Astoria-a sleepy coastal community that has seen a recent rebirth in both its tourist trade and its sardine business-into an industrial zone and a terrorist target.
Specifically, four separate companies want to build terminals on the Columbia River-two further upriver, and two just downriver of Astoria. Each would cover 50 to 75 acres-more than 40 football fields-and sprout storage tanks as high as a 17-story building, to receive imported liquefied natural gas, also known as LNG. (There is a fifth terminal proposed to the south, in Coos Bay.) One project, requiring condemnation of private land, is on the agenda of the Port of St. Helens this week, while a federal public hearing on another, near Puget Island in the river, will occur the day after.
Much of Portland may be focused on a battle of environmental vs. economic development involving a proposed casino in the Columbia River Gorge, 40 miles to the east. Far less attention, however, gets paid in the other direction, 90 miles west, where a fight of greater import and drama is playing out.
"The people that use Astoria and Cannon Beach as a playground don't understand what LNG means to them," says Duncan. "But people in Portland should care, because Astoria is very close to them, and LNG will affect the way they use the river and the coast."
Perched on a hill capping the northwest tip of Oregon, Astoria looks much like it always has: a coastal town of extraordinary, if slightly run-down, beauty. There are quaint old Victorians; cute shops; Finnish saunas; museums and bookstores commemorating the town's shipping past as well as Lewis & Clark, who ended their westward journey here two centuries ago. The oldest American settlement west of the Rockies, Astoria was once described by Thomas Jefferson as "the germ of a great, free and independent empire."
This city of 10,000 has suffered since the '80s with the decline of the timber and fishing industries, but it has lately seen a renaissance fueled by second-home buyers, California refugees, a revived tourist industry, a rebuilt downtown and a resurgent sardine harvest. The unemployment rate, at 6 percent-a half-point better than the state average-is the lowest it's been in years, and the city's Sunday market, extending four city blocks with more than 200 vendors, claims to be the second-largest open-air market in the state.
But in the past 10 months, a proposed bit of economic development has divided the town.
The spark igniting that division: liquefied natural gas. As the permanent end of cheap oil seems to get closer every day, the energy giants and the federal government have been pushing to expand the use of natural gas, a fossil fuel that is often found in the same locales as oil but is cleaner-burning and more abundant. British Petroleum claims the world has a 67-year supply of natural gas, compared with 41 years for oil.
While natural gas can't be used in most cars, it can heat homes and power plants. Currently, 23 percent of energy consumed in the United States comes from natural gas, but the output from wells in the United States and Canada is dwindling fast, and local utilities like NW Natural are now looking thousands of miles overseas to countries like Iran, Qatar, Indonesia, Australia and Russia.
For natural gas to be shipped across the seas economically, it must be condensed to a liquid, one-six-hundredth its normal volume, and transported in refrigerated tankers at 260 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Despite that challenge, industry representatives say tanker loads can be offloaded at less than a third of the current wholesale ...
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