Coast Residents Have Eight Days to Address Early LNG Concerns

• Lone Pre-Hearing Set on One of the Proposals within the Greater Malibu Area

BY HANS LAETZ

LNG ALERT
OceanWay Hearing

The project’s application can be found on the Internet at http://dms.dot.gov/search/searchResultsSimple.cfm?
numberValue=26844&searchType=docket
Comments may be submitted at that location, or by mail by Oct. 12 to
Docket Management Facility, US Department of Transportation,
1200 New Jersey Ave SE, West Building, Room
W12-140, Washington, DC 20590-0001.

Wednesday’s open house with exhibits and informal Q-and-A conversations will start at 4:30 p.m., and the public may speak from 6:30-8:30 at the LAX Marriott, 5855 W. Century Blvd., Los Angeles. Federal officials will validate parking.

Malibu Mayor Pro Tem Pamela Conley Ulich said she is “shocked, and very disappointed” that the City of Los Angeles forgot to tell Malibu that it unexpectedly scheduled a public hearing on a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal that would sit in the ocean six miles closer to Malibu than to the City of Angels.

The City of L.A.’s project manager for the Woodside Natural Gas evaluation effort on Tuesday rejected Malibu’s request to schedule a public meeting here, Conley Ulich said.

The sudden action by the Los Angeles City Department of Public Works sent coastal activists along the entire coast scrambling to prepare for a public hearing next week over a proposed LNG terminal 21 miles offshore of Point Dume. The L.A. official reportedly apologized to Conley Ulich for forgetting to include the City of Malibu on the notification list.

Virtually no one in Malibu knew about next Wednesday’s meeting until the Malibu Surfside News discovered it on an obscure federal announcements web site Monday, and began asking city officials and environmentalists if they planned to attend. Officials at one group, Heal The Bay, said they had been notified, but four other ocean groups were not.

Local officials also expressed outrage that the only public meeting on the environmental criteria by which the project will be judged was scheduled to take place near Los Angeles Airport.

“It is a disgrace that the only hearing is scheduled on short notice and so far away from Malibu,” said Malibu City Councilmember Andy Stern. “Certainly if there is a genuine desire for input, a closer location for the meeting is required.”

Spokespersons for several environmental groups learned about the looming meeting from The News Monday.

“I’m rather stunned to learn that they’re already having a hearing,” said Marcia Hanscom, director of the Coastal Law Enforcement Action Network. “We’re not prepared for it.”

The meeting announcement for Woodside’s proposal—marketed as “OceanWay”—was quietly released by the U.S. Coast Guard and City of Los Angeles late last week. The hearing is called a “scoping session,” and gives the public a chance to learn about the project and tell independent scientific analysts what aspects of the proposed LNG terminal should be examined.

Coastal advocates and residents were given eight business days to find and digest the project’s 5721-page application, which was also released on the difficult-to-navigate government Internet site last week. The hearing will be held at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott, 33 rush-hour miles from Point Dume, the nearest point of land to the proposed OceanWay LNG terminal.

The City of Los Angeles’ project manager said the decision to have just one distant meeting on brief notice was final. Linda Moore said she had no response to protests from Malibu residents complaining there is no hearing here, or needing time to digest an LNG application that fills an entire crate of loose-leaf binders.

Moore said Wednesday’s meeting is not a hearing, but rather “an informational session for people to learn about the project and for us to listen.”

Rory Cox, who coordinates LNG campaigns for Environment California, said he was surprised and would scramble to study the massive, just-released Woodside proposal “so someone can make proper comments at the session.”

Hanscom said the impact of the Woodside plant in Santa Monica Bay would be much different than what the BHP Billiton plant would have been 30 miles away. “There’s a very different geology and a very different biology, and while I know they are touting this as the greatest green project ever, there are a lot of other issues we have to learn about,” she said.

Heal The Bay scientist Sara Abramson said her group learned of the meeting late last week. “I’m not sure if all the people active in this really know what the project really means yet.”

The Woodside Natural Gas project is substantially different from the ill-fated BHP Billiton request at Malibu, in that no permanent floating factory ship would be used. In addition, Woodside’s project would emit less smog, and would be almost twice as far offshore as the BHP LNG ship.

Woodside plans to use a pair of regasification ships that would circle out to offshore waters, take LNG on board from transoceanic carriers, and then transport it back to a pair of buoys between Point Dume and Catalina Island. There, one ship at a time would warm the LNG into natural gas using ambient air, and pipe the gas ashore across the seabed and past the airport to a receiving station near the 405 Freeway in Inglewood.

Since the undersea gas lines would come ashore on City of Los Angeles beaches and airport property, L.A.’s Public Works Department is handling the environmental hearings in cooperation with the federal lead agency, the Coast Guard.

CLEARWATER PORT PROTESTED

Several dozen demonstrators rallied on a dock in Ventura Harbor last week to protest plans by NorthernStar Natural Gas to convert a 28-year-old oil platform 12.6 miles off Oxnard into an LNG facility.

NorthernStar had invited about 30 guests to take a whale-watching cruise out to Platform Grace Thursday, and hear the company’s plans to convert the top of the rig into an LNG regasification processing plant.

Members of several Oxnard groups quietly held banners and told reporters that the proposal is unsafe, unsightly and unwanted.

Several persons boarding the NorthernStar-chartered boat said they supported LNG, but others expressed skepticism and said they wanted to hear what both company officials and environmentalists had to say before taking sides.

Lois Glab, a member of the Ventura County Republican Woman’s Club, said she had taken no position on the old BHP Billiton proposal and “I want to listen, to see what [NorthernStar has] to say” about the new LNG proposal.

Ventura attorney Bruce Paller boarded the boat after professing that he had opposed the air pollution exemptions sought in the BHP proposal, which was shot down by state agencies last April. “I want to see what other third parties have to say—like environmentalists and the government.” Paller said. “I want to confirm that this port will not emit too much air pollution and be good for the environment, like they promise.”

The NorthernStar LNG proposal, 35 miles northwest of Malibu, will have its environmental hearings Oct. 3 in Oxnard and Oct. 4 in Santa Clarita, where new gas transmission lines would be installed.

SB 412 SHELVED

For the second year in a row, a proposed state law to require an assessment of whether LNG terminals are even needed in California was shelved. Environmentalists said it was killed by Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, who was responding to heavy lobbying from union interests that would benefit from jobs created by LNG projects.

Senate Bill 412, authored by state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, was strongly supported by Susan Jordan’s California Coastal Protection Network. It was also supported by Woodside and NorthernStar, but opposed by lobbyists for the Mitsubishi-Shell LNG terminal proposed for the Long Beach harbor.

Supporters said they will try to bring the measure to the floor when the Legislature reconvenes in January.