Is there no pleasing the environmentalists?
Apparently not, judging from the reaction to last week’s announcement by an energy company to build a virtually invisible offshore LNG terminal 20 miles west of LAX. The new-technology terminal has the potential of being the breakthrough solution to a big problem.
But environmentalists treated the announcement as more problem than solution.
Here’s the background: Years ago, environmentalists told us we needed to stop burning so much dirty coal and oil and burn more clean natural gas. Lots of businesses did just that; most power plants proposed in the last 10 years would be fueled by natural gas. One-third of the electricity produced in California comes from natural gas.
In fact, demand for natural gas has increased such that now we need to import it from overseas. That’s no simple feat, since it’s difficult to send vapor on a ship. The gas must be turned into liquid by cooling it to 260 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The liquid is 1/600th the volume of gas, which makes the economics of shipping work. The liquefied gas is poured into a special tanker that amounts to a big floating Thermos and can be shipped from places that don’t need it, like the outback of Australia, to places that do need it, like L.A.
Once the ship with the liquefied natural gas or LNG arrives, the liquid must be put in a terminal. It is warmed up, turned into a gas again and pumped into existing distribution lines, where the gas flows everywhere from big electricity generators to the burner tip in your furnace.
But environmentalists don’t like the whole idea of LNG terminals. Onshore LNG terminals pose an environmental hazard, they said. And they may be unsafe. Offshore terminals are ugly. Some systems turn the water so cold that fish and fish eggs are killed.
That’s why last week’s announcement by Woodside Natural Gas Inc. of Australia was remarkable. Sure, its proposal needs to be vetted for safety and environmental concerns, but if it performs as advertised, it would be a breakthrough. That’s because its system needs no terminal. LNG ships would sail up to a buoy halfway between Point Dume, Malibu, and the northern tip of Santa Catalina Island. The ship would hook up to a flexible pipeline. The liquid would be gasified on the ship and the gas would be sent through the underwater pipe and come ashore near LAX. The whole operation would be virtually invisible, except for a ship on the horizon. And thanks to the distance from shore, safety concerns would be greatly lessened.
Yet some environmentalists responded by questioning the need for more natural gas, and at least one said they will push for conservation instead.
The reality is that conservation, while it may help a little, is no solution. California, and particularly southern California, is dependent on imported natural gas more than any other place in the U.S. The state pipes in 85 percent of its natural gas from elsewhere in the U.S.; the U.S. as a whole imports only 15 percent. And it’s expensive to import here from traditional sources, since the state is far from the gas-producing regions of the Texas-Louisiana basin and Canada.
Building some terminals is a no-brainer solution. Yet there’s not one such terminal on the West Coast.
Most of us want to heat our homes in winter, cool them in the summer and have electricity year round. A low-impact LNG ship that you can see on the horizon from LAX is a very good price to pay for those necessities.
*Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at
[email protected]
