Democratic Sweep May Further Slow Malibu LNG Port Plan

• Boxer and Waxman Will Chair Committes and Increased EPA Oversight Is Expected to Follow

BY HANS LAETZ

The seismic shift in Congress—and two little-noticed electoral changes in Sacramento—may have very real impacts along the California coast, where new offshore oil drilling, and proposed floating liquefied natural gas proposals, may all of a sudden face tougher scrutiny.

Cabrillo Port, the floating LNG storage and regasification ship planned for Malibu waters, is sailing into its final decision-making period this winter, and coastal advocates said they expect close congressional scrutiny of a regulatory process they said was stacked in favor of LNG importers.

The immediate fate of the Malibu LNG terminal now sits with the little-noticed, three-member California State Lands Commission, which has two new members elected last week. Spokespeople for both Lt. Governor-elect John Garamendi and Controller-elect John Chiang both told the Malibu Surfside News it is too soon for either to make a statement about Cabrillo Port.

“I’m sure you understand the entire emphasis was on the election, and we are only now studying specific policy issues,” said Chiang spokeswoman Trisha Murakowa.
The Lands Commission’s third vote is held by a high-ranking official to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and is expected to vote the governor’s bidding.

Schwarzenegger has backed off of earlier statements of support and just before the election issued a strongly-worded statement pledging a thorough look at Cabrillo Port’s energy supply, safety and pollution issues.

With the new commissioners being sworn in Jan. 8, commission spokesman Dwight Sanders said Monday that the Cabrillo Port Environmental Impact Report will not come up for a hearing and vote until March at the earliest, overshooting original estimates by months. “The process of evaluation continues, and we certainly think it will be completed by the end of the first quarter (of 2007),” he said.

BHP Billiton officials had targeted Spring 2005 as their target for securing permission to build Cabrillo Port, their marketing name for a 14-story-high set of rounded storage tanks, smoke stacks and regasification ovens that the Australian company wants to float in 3,000 feet of water about 16 miles southwest of Point Dume.

If the LNG terminal secures State Lands Commission approval, it would next go to the California Coastal Commission. If approved there, the reelected governor would have the opportunity to approve or deny the permit.

In Washington, efforts to loosen offshore oil drilling restrictions on California’s outer waters appear dead, with the U.S. House of Representatives version of a new offshore drilling bill left without its chief sponsor, defeated House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo.

A compromise Senate bill, which would not open up additional California waters, may be the best that drillers can hope for, according to Washington news reports.

On the Senate side, Sen. Barbara Boxer is in line to chair the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and pledged to act on global warming issues as first priority. “Time is running out, and we need to move forward on this,” Boxer was quoted as saying during a conference call with D.C. reporters.

Rep. Henry Waxman, the Democrat who represents Malibu and L.A.’s Westside, becomes one of the majority party’s highest-ranking Congressman next session, and Waxman expects success for his Safe Climate Act in the 110th Congress. If enacted, it would extend California’s groundbreaking laws nationwide, and roll back the nation’s total allotted greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020.

“Global warming will be back on the agenda now, but whether anything gets enacted and signed by the President is another matter altogether,” was the pessimistic assessment by Marchent Wentworth, a legislative lobbyist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a telephone interview from Washington.

Schwarzenegger’s law, AB 32, calls for similar rollbacks here, but some LNG opponents have cautioned that bureaucrats appointed by the Governor to implement AB 32 might favor the use of LNG as a “bridge fuel” for several decades. Conservationists say that will hurt the growth of renewable energy sources, while increasing America’s reliance on imported fossil fuels.

“Clean coal technology may not be ready for a few years, and I need to heat my house right now,” said Bill Cooper, director of the Center for LNG, a Washington lobbying group, in a telephone interview. “A lot of people feel natural gas is the cleanest burning fossil fuel we have available, with the lowest relative fossil fuels.

”But others in D.C. disagreed: “There is a fundamental disconnect between the push for lower carbon emissions and any movement towards LNG imports,” said Wentworth.

“I think BHP Billiton is delusional if they think their project will reduce our state’s greenhouse gases,” said Rory Cox, a San Francisco director of Environment California, an anti-LNG group. Cox’s group points to its studies which portray LNG as dirtier than coal, if the enormous amounts of greenhouse gas burned to liquefy, transport and regasify it are included in the equation.

Cox said the big implication of a Democratic Congress “is the shenanigans at EPA,” where lack of congressional oversight has led to some interpretations of pollution rules that benefited the energy industry in general and Cabrillo Port in particular.