LNG plans fade away as supporters' arguments vanish - VC TSar op ed
Hans Laetz, Newsgroup Editor
Op Ed, Ventura County Star
The Liquified Natural Gas industry is once again sailing off into
California’s golden sunset, and Ventura County can breathe a sigh of
relief.
The California State Lands Commission has revoked NorthernStar’s
application to convert an old oil platform off Ventura Harbor into an
LNG import terminal. Thus dies the fifth and final LNG terminal
proposed for California over the last decade.
Gone is the prospect of huge LNG tankers anchored off the couty’s
coastline. But not forgotten is the lesson that everything the LNG
people told Californians over the last five years was wrong.
Go back and you will find five different companies hiring local P.R.
companies and campaigning for proposed LNG terminals at Vallejo,
Ventura, Malibu/Oxnard, Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Big energy was not alone in its drive for LNG. It paid for top-tier
memberships at local business groups, ensuring their support. They
rented advocates by signing up local “taxpayers’ associations” that
were mere lobbying and letter-writing fronts. They got plenty of
support from corporate brethren at the local and state chambers of
commerce and the California Manufacturers Association.
Former energy officials from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s team were
hired, including one put to work on the Ventura terminal for a
$400,000 salary. In Sacramento, energy department functionaries
watched their colleagues go out the revolving door for big money, and
issued official findings — later retracted — that LNG imports were
crucial to the state’s energy portfolio.
One of the LNG wannabes, BHP Billiton, went so far as to create its
own support letters from taxpayers for its proposed LNG ship off Point
Mugu. Letters suspiciously echoing BHP’s talking points were entered
into an obscure public-comment file in Washington, D.C., without the
knowledge of the people who supposedly signed them.
The LNG people told us that America could not supply its own natural-
gas needs. This was wrong, spectacularly wrong. It turns out advances
in shale gas technology have turned the U.S. into the nation with the
third-largest natural gas reserves in the world — behind Qatar and
Russia. Pennsylvania has more natural gas than Saudi Arabia. North
America companies are actually going to export LNG, through Canada, to
China.
Lobbyists told us natural gas was needed as a bridge fuel for the
conversion to renewables. But U.S. per capita natural gas consumption
is flat, or even dropping slightly, and has been for the past decade.
The conversion to renewables is beginning without a massive increase
in natural-gas use.
The LNG people told us California is at the end of long,
oversubscribed pipelines for domestic gas. That was wrong, too. New
pipelines are being built from the new natural gas fields of Colorado
and Wyoming to our state.
The lobbyists told us LNG was a national energy security must-have.
But the trickle of LNG that has just begun flowing into California is
from Russia, of all places. Sempra Energy just opened a new LNG
terminal near Tijuana, where environmental laws are an afterthought.
Vladimir Putin’s Gazprom conveniently bought 49 percent of the Tijuana
plant’s capacity after it was finished, and Gazprom’s Houston office
tells the oil-industry press it will corner 10 percent of the U.S.
wholesale natural gas market with a flood of surplus LNG from Siberia.
Get that? Russia, with its track record of shutting off European
natural gas supplies for political bludgeoning, is aiming to corner 10
percent of a strategic part of the U.S. energy industry. So much for
energy independence. Massive greenhouse gas emissions will result from
the energy-intensive liquefaction process and LNG shipping effort,
while home-grown solar and wind power will be undercut by cheap
Russian gas.
Moscow’s hand will soon be on the valves that control West Coast
electricity generation. This is the energy security that LNG imports
will give us.
All of which must be remembered when the same cast of lobbyists,
friendly regulators, business groups and others clamor for whatever
new insult to our coastline that oil speculators come up with.