Public comment period on environmental impact report ends Friday.
By Hans Laetz / Special to The Malibu Times
Public comment on the scientific aspects of the proposed 14-story-tall liquefied natural gas terminal off the Malibu coast closes Friday, while local efforts to fight the project at the next step are ramping up.
Residents have until Friday, May 12, at 4 p.m. to e-mail the California State Lands Commission with comments on the 2,500-page environmental impact report that examines Cabrillo Port, the floating LNG factory ship that the Australian mining company BHP Billiton wants to anchor 13.8 miles off Leo Carrillo Beach, near Malibu’s northwest end.
The raucous public hearing April 18 at Malibu High School galvanized the organization of some LNG opponents in Malibu, some of whom spent last weekend gathering signatures for an anti-LNG petition at local markets to present to the governor.
LNG activists from the California Coastal Protection Network have been meeting with Malibu groups, such as local Realtors, to explain how residents can help.
“I spent last weekend at How’s Trancas Market and gathered 280 signatures myself,” said Phil Bailey, president of the Malibu Board of Realtors. “It’s important that Gov. Schwarzenegger gets the word that his neighbors in Malibu will not accept the LNG plant on our coastline.”
State Lands Commission officials and maritime safety experts from the federal government now have to wade through stacks of letters and hours of testimony to find relevant comments about the proposed project’s safety, said Dwight Sanders, a SLC hearing officer, in a telephone interview.
“We’ve been getting scores of letters, and also a large number of form letters,” Sanders said. “About 5 percent or 10 percent of them are making comments on the EIR, while the rest of them are making opinions about the desirability of the project.”
Buried in the landslide of information and passion response from the Malibu public hearing two weeks ago was the company’s announcement that it would comply with the stricter, onshore smog regulations by cleaning up the emissions from a large, ocean-going tugboat that would make weekly roundtrips between San Francisco Bay and Long Beach Harbor, among other steps.
BHP Billiton President Renee Klimczak said the tugboat conversion would be added to previously announced plans to use cleaner burning natural gas for the tugboats that will service and patrol Cabrillo Port. The company also plans to have LNG tankers switch from polluting bunker oil to natural gas fuel when in coastal waters.
Company spokesman Patrick Cassidy said the company’s “Clean Neighbors Initiative” would eliminate more smog from California skies than Cabrillo Port would emit off Malibu.
“We would think that we will more than exceed the applicable emissions laws on the mainland,” he said in a telephone interview.
But staff lawyers at the Environmental Defense Center said the BHP Billiton plan is merely a restatement of existing promises, and said the LNG terminal’s approval process should be delayed until the new plan is evaluated.
“Right now, all we have is a company press release, and no information for us to analyze to see if there really would be an emissions offset,” said attorney Karen Krause at the EDC office in Santa Barbara.
Krause said reducing emissions from a tugboat that travels to San Francisco would not adequately offset the hundreds of tons of smog-causing emissions that would come from Cabrillo Port as its boilers heat the LNG into natural gas before it’s transferred via underwater pipelines to Oxnard.
“The emissions from Cabrillo Port are going to blow ashore primarily in Ventura and Los Angeles counties, and the tug would be traveling far outside the area that is going to be negatively affected,” Krause said.
BHP Billiton’s Cassidy said the company came away from the contentious public hearings in Oxnard and Malibu, where LNG opponents shouted and drowned out comments made by LNG supporters, with several lessons.
“There are a lot of misunderstandings out there, a lot of engagement that we need to make,” he said. “Some of the people I talked to out in Malibu thought we were going to be drilling; thought we were dealing in oil exploration.”
Cassidy said the company would examine the messages from the nearly 50 Malibu residents who spoke against the project at Malibu High School, but said he doesn’t understand the major bone of contention by Malibu residents: the proposed permanent anchoring of the 14-story-high, triple set of tanks on a ship visible on the city’s southwest ocean horizon.
“There are some 5,000 ships transiting that area every year, and people don’t seem to object to them,” Cassidy said from his Houston office. “Our ship won’t even be visible most of the time.”
State officials are not certain on a new timeline for the Cabrillo Port project. Sometime in late August, the SLC may hold a second round of hearings on the project itself, Sanders said, with a decision possible by the end of the year.
The three-member SLC board consists of California State Controller Steve Westly, Lt. Gov. Cruz M. Bustamante and State Director of Finance Michael C. Genest, an appointee of Gov. Schwarzenegger. Westly and Bustamante are both running for statewide office and have publicly opposed offshore oil and energy projects, while Schwarzenegger last year gave a vote of support for the BHP Billiton terminal.
Although the hearing on Cabrillo Port’s master environmental permit is ending, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has just opened up a pair of public comment periods on BHP Billiton’s request for air and water pollution permits for the Cabrillo Port. The EPA has proposed allowing the LNG terminal to discharge nearly 300 tons of smog-producing hydrocarbons, nitrous oxides and other pollutants per year into the atmosphere just upwind of Malibu and the Los Angeles air basin.
Environmentalists have criticized the EPA for retracting its earlier requirements that the project meet onshore smog rules. The agency last year said it would exercise its discretion to consider the floating LNG boilers to be in the Channel Islands, 25 miles away from the ship, as opposed to the mainland, 13.8 miles from the vessel, where stricter smog rules prevail.
BHP Billiton also proposes to discharge heated water into the ocean, a prospect that some marine biologists say will kill millions of fish larvae and floating plant life.
The EPA’s hearing on the proposed water discharge permit will take place May 23, and the air pollution hearing will take place June 5, both at the Oxnard Performing Arts Center, 800 Hobson Way, Oxnard. Additional information about the EPA permits, including the address to send comments, can be found at http://www.epa.gov/region09/liq-natl-gas/index.html#cabrillo. Comments on the overall LNG project’s impact are being accepted by the state until 4 p.m. Friday via e-mail to BHPRevisedDEIR@slc.ca.gov