Questions linger over proposed Columbia LNG sites

By Paul Haist

article created on: 2008-09-01T00:00:00

Many years ago when I lived in Astoria I often laughed to myself at the sight of two loaded log trucks passing one another in opposite directions. This happened all the time.

Their loads were always essentially identical—usually the same species of tree and about the same size, each headed toward where the other had just come from.

The question was obvious: If someone to the north has logs to sell and someone also to the north wants to buy logs, wouldn’t it be more cost-effective to make the exchange among themselves—and likewise for the people to the south—and not go to the trouble, expense and risk of shipping the logs past one another on the highway?

I was reminded of this by Allen Neuringer’s letter on this page about the controversy over plans to build two liquid natural gas terminals on the lower Columbia River. Neuringer, a property owner in the path of a proposed LNG pipeline, ridicules—not unreasonably—the prospect of our importing natural gas from the Middle East while we may export our domestic natural gas overseas, like log trucks passing on the highway.

It may not be feasible to transfer our domestic gas around the North American continent. I don’t know. But if we have so much natural gas to export (19.8 billion cubic feet last year or 1.6 percent of estimated total world exports), and if we are a net exporter of natural gas, it seems that building new LNG import facilities in this country may not be so much in the interest of the natural gas consumer as much as it is in the interest of those who sell and transport the natural gas—the timber brokers and log truck operators of the LNG industry, so to speak.

The public should demand an objective and definitive answer now to the pivotal and to my knowledge the as yet not satisfactorily answered question regarding the need for LNG terminals here. Proponents and opponents of the terminals seem mostly confirmed in their positions, but I suspect most of the rest of us remain insufficiently informed. If the answer is out there, it has yet to be communicated in a broadly compelling way.

Do we or do we not have in our own land enough natural gas to meet what should be our clearly understood needs in this region at an acceptable cost for the foreseeable future without importing LNG? Also, are there limitations on our ability to deliver domestic gas anywhere we need it in the country, a limitation that might argue for import?

For the record, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that the United States produced 1,478,720 million cubic feet more natural gas last year than it consumed.

Because Oregon is an environmental treasure land and Oregonians, by and large, treasure this land, the wide-ranging environmental implications cited by Neuringer should be taken seriously. If the region’s energy needs can be met by domestic gas and other sources, then protection of the environment—the protection of Oregon—trumps the LNG industry in spades.

Bradwood Landing upstream from Astoria is the site of one of the two proposed LNG terminals. The other is on the Skipanon River just west of Astoria at Warrenton.

I am very familiar with both locations, but especially with the Bradwood site, which I visit by boat. Bradwood and the immediately adjacent Clifton across from Puget Island comprise a lush, verdant, wildlife-rich and extraordinarily beautiful locale that is also historically significant.

I have gone there on the water for more than 20 years for the good it does my soul to be in such a beautiful and quiet place.

If Bradwood becomes an industrial site—forget for a moment whether it’s truly needed, if we lose what it is today, Oregon will be measurably poorer in two things which most distinguish our state, its natural beauty and the love that Oregonians have for that beauty.

Something to love won’t be there anymore. It will have been replaced by pipes and pumps and giant ships and tanks of flammable gas. It won’t be ours to visit anymore. It will be gone.

We have an obligation to learn the facts, the true facts. And it should be our right, with almost no exceptions, to decide among ourselves what will happen where we live, no matter what the public servants at Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or Congress think.