Cathlamet vents over plans for LNG plant
Thursday, October 27, 2005 8:26 AM PDT
By Amy M. E. Fischer
Printable version
E-mail this articleCATHLAMET -- Angry citizens faced off with federal regulators Wednesday night in the latest of a series of contentious public hearings over plans to build a liquified natural gas plant on the Oregon side of the Columbia River.
More than 125 people attended the meeting at Julius Wendt Elementary School, during which representatives from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission fielded area residents' thorny questions about the LNG plant. Northern Star Natural Gas hopes to build in Bradwood, Ore., an abandoned mill town less than a mile from Puget Island.
FERC and the U.S. Coast Guard must approve the $520 million project before Northern Star may break ground, which the gas company hopes to do in 2007. The terminal would be operational by 2010 and could handle up to 125 LNG tankers a year.
LNG is natural gas that is supercooled into a liquid state and shipped overseas in specially constructed tankers, then heated back into a gas and distributed through pipelines.
Wednesday, the audience quickly became frustrated at the lack of specific answers FERC's environmental project manager and liquified natural gas engineer had to offer. Coast Guard representatives did not attend the meeting, raising the ire of those who wanted to know how much the LNG tanker ships would disrupt fishing and boating on the river.
Over and over again, audience members accused FERC of withholding critical information about the project. FERC project manager Paul Friedman and engineer Kareem Monib explained that their agency hadn't yet analyzed the environmental and safety data Northern Star is compiling.
The crowd, many of whom wore red t-shirts emblazoned with "I am NOT an LNG 'acceptable risk,' hectored the two FERC agents. During a slide show about how the plant and pipeline would be constructed, a woman called out in the dark, "Where are the homes that you don't show that you're destroying?"
When the lights came back on, the pointed questions continued. "So where do you guys live at? Is there one (an LNG plant) near you?" a woman asked.
"Actually, there is," said Friedman, a resident of the Washington, D.C., area.
"Is there one within a mile of where you live at?" the woman shot back.
"No," Friedman admitted, appearing pink-cheeked and harried.
Another woman stood up and shouted, "How do you justify trashing our rivers? Because that's what this company will be doing if you go ahead!"
FERC did not propose the LNG plant, Friedman reminded the grumbling crowd.
When an audience member suggested that FERC was merely a mouthpiece for Northern Star, Friedman replied, "I hope I do not parrot anything Northern Star has to say, and I hope that FERC does an independent fact checking of everything they send in."
The studies will have cost Northern Star more than $14 million by the time the project is finished, said Gary Coppedge, the company's vice-president of permitting and development. Sitting in the back of the auditorium, Coppedge said he knows many people are upset, "but that's because they don't have the information."
The LNG plant permitting process is still in its earliest stages, and the community will have additional opportunities to air their views, he said.
"We're developing the information, and these public input sessions allow us to develop answers to address the concerns of the public," he said.
Opponents of the LNG plant worry about a catastrophic explosion, that the storage tanks and the massive ships that deliver the gas would be targets for terrorist attacks. Proponents argue that natural gas is clean, efficient, abundant and needed, and LNG has a long track record of safe deliveries for over 40 years.
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