Opinion: Gas companies full of hot air
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You’d have to feel sorry for the energy giants that want to build liquefied natural gas terminals in California, if their own arrogance weren’t to blame for the bulk of their troubles.
On Tuesday, environmentalists won a victory against Australian energy company BHP Billiton over a proposed LNG plant that would be located 14 miles off the coast of Oxnard. The gist of it is that local air regulators have agreed to stand up to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which is trying to bend emissions rules on behalf of BHP.
Liquefied natural gas is not a subject that pops up at many L.A. cocktail parties, but maybe it should. Regulators are making decisions on LNG terminals that will have a big impact on Californians’ lives -- and not just on the size of their energy bills. The state imports its natural gas, and with rising demand it’s going to need more of it to get by. The gas can be imported fairly cheaply by liquefying it and sending it across the ocean on specialized tankers, but California doesn’t have any terminals where it can be unloaded. There are several proposals to build them, but all have problems; a proposed terminal in the Port of Long Beach, for example, might be a safety hazard. And BHP’s in Oxnard has pollution issues -- all those tankers going to and fro will spew tons of toxins into the air, which will drift into Ventura County and possibly beyond.
BHP’s strategy is to get federal regulators to overrule local standards that require polluters to buy credits to offset their emissions. BHP isn’t being unreasonable -- it may be impossible to build the terminal under existing local requirements, because there simply aren’t enough pollution credits available in Ventura County to offset all the crud the tankers will emit. But Tuesday’s decision indicates that local decision-makers will fight it every step of the way and throw up so many roadblocks that BHP may eventually be forced to give up.
BHP and the other companies trying to build LNG terminals in California might have avoided at least some of the opposition. For two years, Assemblyman Joe Simitian has tried to get a bill through the state Legislature that calls for a state commission to study all the various LNG terminal proposals and rank them according to such criteria as safety, pollution and degree to which they’ll meet future energy demand. The Times has called for its passage, but it has repeatedly been blocked by the energy companies. They clearly fear that an objective analysis would rule some of their projects out -- but it would also give a big boost to the best proposals, and might allay some of the concerns of people in Long Beach and Ventura County. The longer LNG importers oppose such legislation, the harder they’re going to have to fight.