Opponents Stay Mobilized One Year after
BHP Defeat
• Strategy that Felled World’s
Largest Miner Being Readied for Next Project in Queue
Last week, two dozen people
celebrated the one-year anniversary of the defeat of
the proposed BHP Billion natural gas factory ship
that—when it was first proposed five years
ago—seemed a lead-pipe cinch to be anchored off the
coast of Malibu in just a few years.
The activists gathered at the Oxnard
Performing Arts Center, where plans for “Cabrillo
Port” were scuttled after the State Lands Commission
found the proposed LNG barge would have violated about two
dozen sections of state and federal wildlife, air pollution,
safety and ocean conservation laws.
In the year since then, the formal
decision-making process for two other proposed
liquefied natural gas terminals not far from Malibu has
begun. Both projects would receive tankers full of
icy-cold fossil fuel shipped from Qatar, Indonesia or
Australia, and warm it up into the natural gas used for
cooking and—increasingly—electrical
generation.
A decision on the next floating LNG
terminal, this one about halfway between Point Dume and
Catalina Island, is expected after another lengthy battle
that will probably end in two to three years, analysts said.
That project, proposed by a subsidiary of the Australian
firm Woodside, would be visible from Malibu’s higher
elevations on clear days.
The other project, proposed for an
oil-drilling platform 12 miles off Ventura by NorthernStar
Natural Gas, would not be visible from Malibu. It
also will get a Cabrillo-like environmental review in two
to three years.
“I think opposition to both projects
is way ahead of where we were at the start, because we learned
of the [BHP] project when it was already almost
approved,” said Susan Jordan, who led the fight
against the Malibu terminal. “Of course, they
have the advantage of coming in much earlier in the process
than we did, and they have the ability to see how we fought
BHP.”
Both companies, however, have said
they also watched the BHP Billiton battle in Malibu, which
culminated with celebrity-laden protests and an
unprecedented Malibu-Oxnard joint effort that raised
nearly $1 million to hire the Environmental Defense Center
lawyers and scientists who found the evidence that
Cabrillo Port was big trouble.
Woodside and NorthernStar promise not
to make the same mistakes, and to meet the California air
quality laws that BHP Billiton enlisted the White House to
evade. The companies have also submitted proposals they
say will avoid nearly all of the environmental objections
to Cabrillo Port.
Environmentalists say those claims have yet
to be analyzed by the federal and state government in the
lengthy environmental impact report process, much less by
the team of experts that found enough holes to sink Cabrillo
Port.
Questions have already been raised about
Woodside’s plan for highpressure delivery
pipes across South Los Angeles, which will be closer to 21 Los
Angeles Unified School District campuses than
allowed by federal safety rules.
The Ventura project is running into the
Oxnard anti-LNG activists, who are still organized and meeting
monthly. The NorthernStar LNG terminal would be stationed
atop a 29-year-old oil rig in 310 feet of saltwater that
coastal residents said they had thought was slated for
dismantling.
The platform 12.6 miles off Ventura Harbor
has some minor, repairable structural problems, the company
acknowledged in its application, and suffered underwater
structural damage in two construction mishaps decades
ago.
In addition, there is still significant
recoverable oil beneath the offshore platform, and federal
energy law appears to prohibit the removal of an oil rig from
production if oil can be profitably recovered.
The entire market assumptions for the
profitable importation of LNG to California may have been
upended, however, by the recent spike in oil prices, which has
also pulled world LNG prices up. A recent LNG sales contract
signed by Indonesia set prices four times greater than
those in LNG studies assumed by those in Sacramento who
said the state needs the gas, putting imported LNG way
more expensive than domestic gas.
Three major pipeline expansions to
bring natural gas to California from producing areas in the
Rockies are being proposed, which could likely bring the West
Coast gas at cheaper prices than from overseas, LNG
opponents say.
In addition, the parent company of the
Southern California Gas Company is about to inaugurate the LNG
plant it rushed to completion in Baja California, where U.S.
environmental review laws could not delay it. That $1
billion-plus plant, called Costa Azul, has capacity equal to
one tenth of the natural gas used on the entire West Coast of
Canada, Mexico and the U.S.
But the parent company, San Diego-based
Sempra, can only recover its costs for building Costa Azul if
LNG flows through it, critics note. The California Public
Utilities Commission is currently considering Sempra’s
request to shift 25 percent of the gas consumed by southern
Californians to LNG imported via Costa Azul, and shield
those long-term contract prices from the public for
“competitive reasons.”
A coalition of environmental groups
estimates that customers of Southern California Gas and
San Diego Gas & Electric—monopolies that are both
regulated Sempra subsidiaries—will pay $5.4 billion
extra to Sempra’s unregulated LNG trading, LNG
terminal and Mexican pipeline subsidiaries over the 20-year
life of the secret LNG contracts.
In filings with the state, Sempra attorney
William Rapp said “LNG supplies could significantly
increase competition, lower prices and increase supply
diversity.” But as to the alleged sweetheart deal
for LNG, Sempra spokespersons refused to take calls from the
Malibu Surfside News, and referred questions to the
Washington LNG lobbying arm of the American Petroleum
Institute, where a spokesperson said she was unable to address
the issue.
Sempra said California’s government
has already acknowledged that California needs additional
natural gas and can get it cheaply from LNG. But opponents
point out that those studies were done by three state officials
who, soon after making that assessment, cashed out and
went to work for LNG hopefuls.
Since Cabrillo Port was defeated, LNG
terminals in Long Beach, New York state and New Jersey have
been killed for varying legal reasons. Several have been
approved in Texas and Louisiana, but U.S. LNG
imports have dropped to record lows because of the high
world price.
BHP Billiton never acknowledged its
defeat in Malibu, and quietly closed its Oxnard office
last summer. The executives campaigning for Cabrillo Port have
left the company, and one of them agreed this week that BHP
Billiton would have been smart to tow Cabrillo Port to China
for use in a market that is much more willing to pay the price
for LNG imports.
