Former PUC President Loretta Lynch says focus should be on alternative energy; liquefied natural gas would require retrofitting of California pipelines and would tax appliances. BHP Billiton says need is there, and stressed its experience and conformance to required standards.
By Ward Lauren / Special to The Malibu Times
Loretta Lynch, former president and board member of the California Public Utilities Commission, recently spoke out against the proposed LNG facility for the Malibu/Oxnard coastline in a talk with the Malibu Association of Realtors. Lynch is an executive scholar at UC Berkeley and a board member of Pacific Environment, an environmental activist organization, and is writing a book on the California energy crisis.
The Australian energy company, BHP Billiton, has proposed anchoring the three-tanker LNG ship 14 miles northwest off the coast from Point Dume.
“I’m not an anti-BHP Billiton person,” Lynch said in interview with The Malibu Times. “I’m an anti-LNG person, and pro-alternative fuels, pro-nonfossil fuels person. Basically, the gist of my talk is, ‘They’re lying, and we can prove it!’ They’re making outlandish projections, not under oath, about huge, huge demand, in order to justify bringing in more supply.”
Lynch likened the plan to import LNG to the nuclear energy decision in the ’50s and ’60s, which required the construction of an entirely new, expensive infrastructure.
LNG, according to the EPA, is natural gas that has been condensed to a liquid by chilling it to about -260 degrees Fahrenheit at atmospheric pressure. After being transferred to a specialized terminal, such as the proposed Cabrillo Port, it is vaporized back to natural gas.
After being regasified at its proposed three-tanker ship, BHP Billiton plans to pipe the natural gas through underwater pipelines that would go ashore at Oxnard.
Lynch said California’s gas pipelines would have to be retrofitted to handle the foreign gas.
“You could generally use it in the same way if it had the same heat content,” Lynch said, “but it doesn’t. Natural gas from North America burns cooler and has less methane than natural gas in other continents. They call that ‘hot gas.’ If you don’t reconfigure the pipeline you’ll start having real safety problems, huge maintenance problems.”
Lynch obtained her information from a report on the Joint Workshop on Natural Gas Quality Standards conducted by the California PUC and the California Energy Commission in February, 2005.
“The appliance manufacturers are up in arms about this. They’re saying, ‘Hey, we’ve calibrated our ovens and our hot water heaters to North American gas standards. Why are you allowing hotter gas to come in? Our appliances will wear out more quickly and have more maintenance problems.'”
It all stems from the fact that liquefied natural gas is not the same as natural gas, she said. Natural gas burns cleaner than coal, but LNG is very close to coal in its greenhouse gas implications. And foreign LNG, generally extracted from a Third World country that doesn’t have the environmental regulations North America does, in the processes of liquefaction and regasification leaks out more greenhouse gas emissions, causing more pollution.
“The system we have now [domestic natural gas] works,” she said. “We’ve got plenty of supply, our stated goals are to go renewable, and instead we’re going to spend $50 billion to $60 billion-just for California-to establish a whole new fossil fuel energy infrastructure which is going to be around for 20 to 50 years.
“This lie that supplies are decreasing is just that. Because as long as you can get people frightened, panicked and in line with an emergency…they’ll pay any price and buy your pig in a poke.”
Lynch said our current supply of domestic natural gas is more available than ever. There are 1,400 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in the lower 48 states. The U.S. uses about 60 billion cubic feet per year, so there is a 60-year supply at current rates of use. Sixteen per cent of California’s yearly supply comes from California, the rest from basins in the Southwest, Rocky Mountain States and Canada, which itself has a 90-year supply under current usage rates, she said.
Kathi Hann, environmental advisor for BHP Billiton in Oxnard, took issue with several of the points raised by Lynch, beginning with the plentiful supply of natural gas.
“The problem is these sources are being depleted,” she said. “The Rocky Mountain fields are prolific, yes, but natural gas pipelines are being built to carry that gas to the East Coast. Because natural gas is a cleaner fuel, a lot of the states are queuing up on that because they want clean air, and that’s what’s going on in Canada. So it’s not so much that our demands are increasing, it’s just that the sources we’ve been relying on for decades are going to be dwindling.”
She said also that BHP Billiton’s LNG all comes from its own fields in Western Australia and is very clean. In the process of chilling natural gas to make it liquid, she said, a great deal of the hydrocarbons and the sulfates fall out, ending up with about 90 per cent methane, which she termed “pipeline quality.”
As for the appliance-damaging, hotter-burning factor of regasified LNG, Hann said some countries, such as Japan, want a hotter gas. They have been using regasified LNG for years; their appliances are built for it.
“The point is that here in the States our specifications are for a gas that is not quite as hot,” she said. “That’s part of what I mean by pipeline quality; it has to meet Southern California Gas Company’s pipeline specs, because once it comes to shore it’s their gas.
“It will meet California standards,” Hann continued. “It will not be hotter burning. It would have to be treated if that were the case, but it’s coming from our wells and we know what the composition of our gas will be. Now I don’t know about the gas from other countries … but Southern California Gas Company is not going to take gas that doesn’t meet its standards.”
Consequently, the statement that California’s gas pipelines must be retrofitted to handle foreign gas is not true, she said, at least not in the case of BHP Billiton’s LNG.
“I haven’t had a chance to talk to Miss Lynch so that she would know those facts,” Hann said. “It would be good if she would check with us about that, because it may be true of other LNG projects; there are plenty of them out there now.”
Questioned about the claim that LNG sent into California’s gas pipelines would require the pipelines to be retrofitted to handle foreign gas, which was stated in a slide presentation during Lynch’s talk before the Malibu Realty Board, Rory Cox of Pacific Environment said, “The slide was not BHP-specific. They [BHP Billiton] are obviously addressing the hot gas situation and are treating their gas, so hot gas would not be an issue in this case.”
Tim Mahoney, Southern California Gas Co. district public affairs manager for Santa Barbara County, corroborated the lack of need for pipeline retrofitting.
“We have a natural gas specification, and once the gas reaches that specification it doesn’t really matter where it comes from, or whether it has been regasified from LNG,” he said. “It’s ‘retail ready gas’…that’s what all the appliances are based on.”
As to the point that opponents say a facility like Cabrillo Port has never been built before, Hann said her company had 120 years of experience, approximately 40 of them in operating floating offshore facilities throughout the world.
“It’s the same technology, same everything except these are oil and Cabrillo Port is gas,” she said. “Actually, there are four onshore LNG facilities in the U.S. and one offshore that have been operating since the late seventies, early eighties.”