What is LNG?
The fastest growing supply solution for what the government considers our current "energy crisis" is the importation of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). By cooling natural gas to -260 degrees Fahrenheit the volume of the gas is reduced to one 600th of its normal volume. This makes it economically possible to transport the gas on large ships (up to 1000 feet long) from far away places like Indonesia, Trinidad, Algeria, and the Middle East.
Once these ships reach our shores the LNG needs to be warmed back up at re-gasification facilities so it can move through pipelines to the end users (power plants, industry, homes). These end users of natural gas are the demand that is creating the "need" for this LNG import, and that demand has grown in the past decade as increasingly industrial users (chief among them chemical and fertilizer producers) and power generators have switched to natural gas because it was less expensive.
This all sounds well and good until communities these LNG receiving facilities are proposed to be located in start reading about possible safety, security and environmental damage. For example the highly respected Rocky Mountain institute wrote in a document prepared for the Pentagon "The energy content of a single standard LNG tanker (one hundred twenty-five thousand cubic meters) is equivalent to seven-tenths of a megaton of TNT, or about fifty-five Hiroshima bombs." When local and state government, and public sees information like this, and couples it with the constant terrorist warnings we get, they are rightfully concerned when such a facility is planned for a populated area. Congress has emphasized the need for such facilities to be placed in remote locations, but that does not seem to be one of the pertinent siting criteria at this time.
At a LNG Community Awareness meeting in early February government energy experts stated that 7-9 new or expanded LNG receiving facilities could meet this country's energy needs for at least the next 20 years. As of early March more than 56 proposed LNG facilities were known to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and 10 of them have already gained regulatory approval. Unfortunately FERC has no strategic plan for the safe and sane siting of these facilities, and plans to approve construction of as many of these facilities as are brought their way and meet their criteria.
What is needed now is swift Congressional action, not to stop LNG development, but to ensure that that development takes place in a safe and strategic way. The FERC gold rush mentality should end, and a plan should be drafted of where to strategically place the 7-9 facilities needed to meet our energy needs, while at the same time ensuring public and environmental safety. How is it that the profit of private enterprise has become a higher priority of FERC then safety?
