News Alert 12.04.07
Coastal Commission Casts Unanimous No Vote on
Cabrillo Port
•BHP Billiton Takes the Fifth as Opponents
Blast Project at Hearing in Santa Barbara•
BHP Billiton placed a high stakes bet Thursday when
it told the California Coastal Commission it would sit silently and
refuse to present its case that the proposed $1 billion liquefied
natural gas terminal complies with state coastal laws.
It lost. In a unanimous 12-0 vote, the commission
ruled today that Cabrillo Port does not comply with federal and
California environmental laws, and sent the Australian company adrift
in a sea of confusion over the offshore LNG facility’s future.
“Is this dead? I think it is mortally
wounded,” said California Coastal Protection Network executive
director Susan Jordan.
BHP Billiton went into the meeting in Santa Barbara
desperately trying to win a delay in the hearing, based on the Monday
night decision by the California State Lands Commission to reject the
controversial project’s environmental impact report and lease.
The company’s silence did not go over well
with several commission members. “It’s annoying that we put
our staff through this and then the applicant chose not to respond at
the hearing,” said Mary Shallenberger before she voted against
it.
Another commissioner said the company’s
silence “points to a certain tendency on behalf of BHP to provide
less information rather than more.” Ben Hueso said, “If BHP
wants to do business in the United States, they need to learn to
provide more information and act responsibly. We feel very protective
of our coastline.”
Legal experts said the company’s only
alternative at this point is to file an eleventh hour lawsuit aimed at
overturning the environmental decision, a suit that they said would be
all but impossible to win.
But a company spokesman said no decision has been
made yet on taking legal action.
“We still are digesting the comments made
Monday and today, and it’s way too early for us to speculate on
what steps we can take,” said company spokesman Patrick Cassidy.
The Coastal Commission vote can be overturned by
the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. But after Monday’s State Lands
Commission decision, the Cabrillo Port initiative appears dead in the
water.
BHP LNG International President Renee Klimczak had
told the Coastal Commission at the start of the hearing that the
company would not state its case on why it should win permission to
build its Cabrillo Port LNG terminal 13.8 miles off the Malibu coast.
Klimczak sat in the audience for most of the
eight-hour session, and refused repeated offers from the commission to
testify or rebut what was said by the 40 persons who spoke against the
project. Not one person testified in its favor.
“We came here to listen to what people are
saying,” said BHP spokesman Patrick Cassidy after the unanimous
defeat of a project in which his company had invested four years and
tens of millions of dollars. As to the possibility of a lawsuit,
Cassidy would not deviate from a written press statement that the
company would evaluate its options.
That’s been the company line since the stern
rejection of Cabrillo Port by a 2-1 majority of the State Lands panel.
That action sent to the recycling heap the 3000-page Cabrillo Port
environmental impact study written over the past three years that said
the project violated environmental laws in at least 20 areas.
State Lands also refused to allow the company to
lay its pipelines across state-owned tidelands at Ormond Beach, Oxnard.
That action effectively killed the project’s federal permit.
But laws require the parallel state application
process to continue on a mandated fast track. Company lawyers spent the
last two days trying to convince state and federal agencies to postpone
the Thursday commission hearing on that parallel state permit.
CCC executive director Peter Douglas said federal
law does not allow anyone to delay the hearing for any reason, and the
only way BHP Billiton could stop proceedings was to withdraw its 2003
application and scrap nearly fours years and tens of millions of
dollars in efforts. BHP did not want to do this.
“We realize this puts the commission in an
embarrassing position, but that is the path they chose,” Douglas
said.
The project, although legally killed in the eyes of
the federal government, must still proceed through the state approval
process, which also calls for a decision on the state permit by Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“The governor needs to step in here with a
clear message,” CCPN’s Jordan said, “and veto
Cabrillo Port.”
The governor was in Washington Thursday, and, in a
news conference there, backed away from his earlier support of LNG as a
greenhouse gas reducing bridge fuel.
“[LNG] is one
of those things where you don’t want to go and protect on the one
side, the environment, and have less greenhouse gas emissions, and then
on the other hand, you create more,” the governor told the San
Francisco Chronicle political blog.
For the third daylong meeting in eight days, Malibu
was represented by Councilmembers Pamela Conley Ulich and Andy Stern.
Conley Ulich blasted BHP Billiton officials for trying to delay the
matter and asked, “Where are they speaking…behind closed
doors?” She said, “I’d like to hear from them
here at this meeting, in public, and [have them] explain to us just
what exactly it is they intend to do now.”
Stern concentrated on the lack of solid evidence
that more natural gas is needed in California, or that prices would
drop if Cabrillo Port were to be built.
Malibu actor Pierce Brosnan sat through four hours
of testimony before he spoke. The actor used his two minutes to again
call on Schwarzenegger to reject Cabrillo Port in the spirit of his
environmentalist credentials. “I know our governor has worked
hard to reduce global greenhouse gases, and to sign AB 32,”
Brosnan said.
“I would like to note that the terminator may
be doing his job globally, but Agent 007 is doing it locally,”
quipped Commissioner Khatchik Achadjian.”
Remy O’Neill, representing the Malibu
Township Council, said the U.S. is behind developing countries on some
environmental issues and cannot afford to add greenhouse gas to the
globe. “We are even behind China in our vehicle emissions
standards. For people at these hearings, air pollution mitigation
doesn’t mean let’s make a deal. It means don’t add
more pollution.”
Ironically, CCC executive director Peter Douglas
revealed early in the meeting that he and BHP officials were close to
solving a major smog problem that helped derail Cabrillo Port at the
Lands Commission: the tremendous amount of greenhouse gas that the
project would generate in the extraction, liquefaction, transport and
reheating of natural gas.
One scientific expert at Thursday’s hearing
estimated the project would emit an amount equal to 40 percent of the
greenhouse gas now being emitted by the people and businesses of New
York City.
But Douglas said BHP Billiton and the state were
near agreement on converting the entire trans-Pacific LNG fleet to
complete natural gas operations.
“We did talk to BHP about running their
tankers on natural gas [exclusively], and I thought they had agreed to
do that,” Douglas said. “But given the turn of events in
the last couple of days, we never got back to that issue.”
