surfaces for California coast
By Hans Laetz / Special to The Malibu Times
A second Australian company has surfaced with plans to anchor a liquefied natural gas terminal somewhere off the coast of Southern California, but the company will not say exactly where the terminal will be placed, although the Malibu coast is a possibility.
And in Los Angeles, a Department of Power and Water official has decided the municipal utility is interested in buying natural gas that might be imported through Malibu in the interest of clean air. The official said he was unaware of how many possible tons of smog an LNG terminal, if one is allowed to be anchored off the coast, will emit into the Los Angeles air basin in the process of reprocessing LNG into natural gas.
Australian energy company Woodside Natural Gas said it will reveal a location in February for its proposed offshore pipeline that will connect directly to LNG carriers. Woodside plans do not include a permanent floating storage and regasification unit, the type of large floating LNG tank ship that BHP Billiton wants to station 13.8 miles off the coast of Malibu.
Instead, Woodside plans to convert LNG to natural gas onboard LNG carriers, which would come and go, and would anchor 15 miles off the coast. The company said it is looking at sites from San Simeon south to San Diego to find a spot that is safe from an ocean environment standpoint.
“First and foremost, we are looking for a site that is remote from populated areas,” said company spokeswoman Wendy Mitchell, who would not rule out the Malibu coast.
But Mitchell said the controversy over Billiton’s proposed LNG terminal at Malibu has not gone unnoticed.
“Woodside has been watching the proceedings along the California coast for some years, and we have heard the objections voiced by coastal residents to some of the projects being planned there,” she said in a telephone interview.
Officials at both Woodside and Billiton said their projects are unaffected by each other, and that both could be built if market conditions dictate. Although seven LNG projects are proposed for the West Coast, officials doubt that more than two will be built.
Woodside calls its plan “OceanWay,” and hopes to mollify ocean advocates by doing without a permanent floating regasification unit.
Mitchell said Woodside is committed to finding a boiling system that emits as little smog as possible, but could not say if Woodside’s emissions would be any less than those possibly forthcoming from Billiton’s FSRU.
A similar system to Woodside’s carrier boilers is used off Louisiana, and it eliminates the transfer of minus 260 degree liquid methane from tankers to the FSRU on the high seas, a technology that has never been proposed until Billiton’s initiative.
LNG opponents have noted that the possibility of catastrophic terrorist attacks, industrial accidents or midsea collisions would remain under either plan, risking explosive venting of huge amounts of methane that some critics say would spread over miles of open ocean and, if ignited, burn structures onshore.
Mitchell said, “Woodside has a track record of 2,000 safe LNG deliveries from its fields in Australia to Japan, made without one serious incident.”
Although those deliveries did not include heating the methane onboard ships on the high seas, Mitchell said the firm is “committed to using the best engineering practices available” to deliver the gas.
The Woodside LNG terminal joins three other LNG proposals along the California coast: the $650 million Billiton proposal off Malibu, a Mitsubishi terminal in Long Beach and a Crystal Energy proposal to convert an unused oil platform near Oxnard into a LNG terminal. Woodside was originally an investor in that Oxnard project, but pulled out last summer.
Susan Jordan, director of the California Coastal Protection Network, said the Woodside proposal needed more details. But she said Woodside seems to be taking into consideration some of the failings that coastal advocates found with the Billiton plan.
The president of Billiton’s LNG subsidiary, Renee Klimczak, said the Woodside announcement shows that her company has made a sound business decision that will benefit Californians, just as Billiton committed three years ago.
“There are a lot of companies talking about bringing LNG into California,” she said. “However, most of them will not even be permitted and even fewer will actually be built.”
The Billiton official said the company’s project has a three-year head start over Woodside, and that it is possible both plants would be built.
The Billiton project, marketed as Cabrillo Port, has gathered the opposition from many along the Malibu coast since it was proposed in 2002 for a location 13.8 miles south of Leo Carrillo State Beach. Its large FSRU would be visible from Point Dume westward on most days, as it would have 11-story-high tanks.
Last week, Billiton announced it had 18 potential industrial customers for gas through Malibu, but only identified one of them, the Los Angeles DWP. The utility’s assistant chief operating officer, Randy Howard, said DWP would use Australian gas at the city’s generating stations if it made economic sense.
“It is the objective of the DWP to reduce emissions across the board, and replacing other fuels with clean burning natural gas is quite important to that end,” he said.
But the DWP official said he was not aware of the 260 tons of smog-producing chemicals that would be pumped into the only clean air basin in Southern California, from which it could blow ashore over Malibu into Los Angeles.
“I was not aware of the local pollution impact, nor should I be,” Howard told The Malibu Times. “Assessing the environmental impact is for others to do, the department is interested in obtaining the gas.”
Longtime Malibu residents remember a bruising battle against the DWP, which at one time insisted on its 1960s plan to build a nuclear power plant in Corral Canyon.
A major reversal last year by the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration found a way for Billiton to get tentative EPA permission to emit the smog-causing chemicals, which would not be allowed if the LNG boilers were on land.
Other federal and state regulators, however, have listed 120 gaps in Billiton’s application and preliminary environmental assessments being done for the project. The company hopes to provide answers to those questions in March, a Billiton official told The Malibu Times last week.
But White House officials last week again pledged to speed environmental review for LNG imports into California, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has already said he favors the Malibu LNG terminal over other alternatives.
Once Woodside files an application, state and federal agencies will start environmental hearings. Assuming approval, the LNG depot would not be operating until 2010, officials said.