US state vowing protracted battle over LNG terminal
Published: Tuesday, 26 July, 2005, 01:13 PM Doha Time
By Brian K Sullivan
gulf-times.com
BOSTON: Rhode Island’s attorney general and the mayor of Fall River, Massachusetts, say they will wage a war of attrition to keep Amerada Hess Corp from building a liquefied natural gas terminal just off Narragansett Bay.
“This is going to be a very long process, a very long, protracted battle,’’ says Attorney General Patrick Lynch, 40. “We will dig our heels in every time. Time is on my side.’’
Proponents of natural gas say the terminals are needed to offload tankers carrying imported gas to meet New England’s rising needs, particularly during peak winter months. A 2003 federal study concluded that, without new terminals, storage and pipelines, regional demand would exceed capacity in 2006.
The drive is colliding with local environmental concerns and questions about whether the tankers might become targets for terrorists.
Lynch and Ed Lambert, mayor of Fall River, where the Hess terminal would be located, say that by the time they have exhausted lawsuits, testimony before state and federal boards, and protests to other government officials, years will have passed and other terminals will have been built, making the Hess project not worth the effort.
“If I am a shareholder at Hess, I would tell the CEO to find a different project,’’ Lambert says. “The market is going to be radically different in five years.’’
On June 30, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or the FERC, gave permission to Hess and gas broker Potent Partners, based in New York, to build an LNG tanker terminal at Fall River, according to Jim Grasso, 51, spokesman for Weaver’s Cove LLC.
Hess and Potent created Weaver’s Cove to build the terminal. Grasso says Weaver’s Cove is confident the FERC decision won’t be overturned and that the terminal will begin receiving shipments by 2009 or 2010.
“These projects are not popular, so if every community had jurisdiction over interstate facilities such as this, nothing would ever get built,’’ Grasso says. “That’s why the Congress established the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.’’
Shares of New York-based Hess, which moves 700,000 barrels of petroleum products around the world daily, hit a 52-week high on July 12 of $116 and closed July 22 at $119.03 in New York Stock Exchange trading.
Weaver’s Cove still must get permission to dredge Narragansett Bay, dispose of the mud, rebuild a US Route 6 bridge in Massachusetts and construct the $400mn, 73-acre (30-hectare) terminal at Fall River.
The city, with a population of about 92,000, is 50 miles (80km) south of Boston.
The Weaver’s Cove terminal would be on the banks of the Taunton River about a mile north of the Interstate-195 bridge. Double-hulled, 900ft (275m) tankers carrying 145,000 cu m of chilled gas from Indonesia, Malaysia, the North Sea and elsewhere would pass under the bridge.
Lynch and Lambert, both Democrats, have already spent a year working against the Hess plan. They say they will file an appeal to the FERC, as allowed under the law. Lambert, 47, says that if the FERC appeal fails, he will sue in federal court to stop the project. “There are a lot of ways to attack and we will find a way to stop it,’’ he says.
The Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation says it will also appeal the FERC decision. Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, has vowed to fight the project, without providing details.
Lynch has fought the project for more than a year. At one point, he rode a tanker into Boston Harbor that was bound for a terminal across the Mystic River from Boston and owned by Paris- based Suez SA. Lynch hired former US anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke to assess the risks to shipping in Narragansett Bay of placing a terminal in Providence, Rhode Island.
A pending federal suit by Lynch will determine whether the ultimate appellate authority over dredging in Narragansett Bay lies with a Rhode Island judge or with the US Secretary of Commerce, says Paul Roberti, 39, chief of Lynch’s regulatory unit.
That suit involved New York-based KeySpan Corp, which wants to build an LNG terminal at Providence. The plan was rejected by FERC, and KeySpan plans an appeal.
All initial dredging requests for the Weaver’s Cove project will first go to the Rhode Island Coastal Management Resources Council and the state’s Department of Environmental Management. Lynch opposes terminals in densely populated areas.
In May, Clarke issued a report saying that terminals become more tempting targets for terrorists when they are built in urban areas. “It is not a new science,’’ says Grasso, the Weaver’s Cove spokesman. “You have a couple of these coming into Tokyo Bay every single day. You have one of these coming into Boston Harbor once a week. It is a proven, safe, secure way to transport energy.’’
Lambert says other gas projects will make Weaver’s Cove unnecessary. Woodland, Texas-based Excelerate Energy LLC has proposed a terminal 13 miles off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The project, called Northeast Gateway, is still awaiting permits from the US Coast Guard and Massachusetts environmental
officials. – Bloomberg |
