The fuel station next door

The visionaries with the plan to bring an LNG terminal to the North Coast held their open house on Tuesday at the Civic Centre, all part of the process of consultation that these mega projects demand of these days.

WestPac the company behind the 300 million dollar project, brought the charts, photos, videos and guest speakers to town to try and answer the questions of the locals who would be neighbours.

They put out their best information to calm any fears that Rupertites might have, advising that the LNG business has been around for over 45 years without a major accident or problem, featuring some two hundred tankers plying the world’s waters delivering and shipping the gas liquefied and cooled to minus 161 Celsius.

The vessels that will call on Rupert if the terminal is constructed will resemble the coal carriers we see in the harbour from time to time, though the LNG vessels will be double hulled and cost around $160 million to build.

Of course for every proponent, there can surely be one or two people who don’t think the plan might be a good idea. An example of one is California Consumer Protection Attorney, Tim Riley (described on his website as a top trial lawyer) who has put out a DVD (available for purchase) putting forward the opposition side of the LNG story, though they do go back some sixty years to tell their story.

Judging by the content of the website and the short video trailer for the documentary, we suspect that this one wasn’t around the Westpac presentation on Tuesday.

However, to understand the stakes involved in the industry, that controversial DVD from Mr. Riley found itself the subject of a report sponsored by the LNG industry, designed to debunk many of the observations made and provide the industries rebutall.

The internet being what it is, has hundreds if not thousands of links to information about the LNG industry, some proclaim the industry as perfectly safe and reliable while others are of the vision that Armageddon is but a boat load away.

It’s hard to figure out which side of the debate a simple citizen should believe. Though it seems the projects as controversial as they are, do appeal to the NIMBY crowd, some it seem are ok with the terminals and the ships, just as long as they’re not sailing by their waterfront estate. The industry seems to suffer a bit of the move it on down the road syndrome, though eventually you guess they must run out of road. This could be how Rupert became a destination location, location, location, considering our spot at the end of a highway, far off the urban path.

Even the rich and famous are not immune from the possibility of tankers cruising by their exotic estates, as this story from Malibu proved. Over three hundred residents of that iconic California city, including many of Hollywood’s heavy hitters came out to move the LNG plans to somebody else’s neighbourhood.

While there’s not quite the A List of stars available along the North Coast, it will be interesting to see who, if anyone is against the projected WestPac plans for Ridley Island. More importantly it would be even more helpful to receive independent information on the dangers and/or benefits of such a project for our part of the world.

Facts always are helpful when an emotional issue comes up for debate, lets hope that we are overwhelmed with easy to understand information, to help us get a complete picture about what this project is all about.

For now, we have the details of the WestPac information session, fresh from the pages of the Daily News Wednesday edition.

LNG PROPONENTS DETAIL PROJECT
By Leanne Ritchie
The Daily News
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
Pages One and Three

Unlike the oil industry, shippers of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) have been operating in water around the world for the past 45 years without any major accidents or problems, said an international expert in the field of LNG shipping.

“We now have a world fleet that’s approaching well over 200 ships. There has never been a serious accident, there has never been a serious release,” said Gary Van Tassel, an engineer with more than 35 years industry experience who has been involved in developing LNG barge designs and exploring potential trade routes.

Van Tassel was one of the speakers available to answer questions during an open house presented by WestPac LNG at the civic centre yesterday.

WestPac is proposing to build a $300 million LNG import and trans-shipment terminal on Ridley Island.

Van Tassel said there have been serious groundings of LNG ships, in which damage to the vessels has approached the scale of the damage that was sustained by Exxon Valdez, but to date there has been no release of cargo.

In part, this has to do with the ships themselves, LNG vessels are among the most costly vessels built – each new ship costs about $160 million.

The vessels themselves look a lot like an empty coal carrier, even when they are fully loaded, because LNG is very light.

The LNG is stored at low pressure and transported in double-hulled carriers with double-walled tanks made of nickel steel and there is an insulation space between the inner and outer hull.

And in the worst-case scenario, if a spill of LNG were to occur, Liquefied Natural Gas simply vaporize, leaving no residue, said Van Tassel.

“The gas is non persistent, it will float on top of the water and rapidly boil off and go up as a vapour.” he said.

“Or, it will find an ignition source, it will burn off, but there will be no environmental damage past that.”

LNG is natural gas that has been liquefied by lowering the temperature to minus 161 Celsius. Because it is stored under very little pressure at very low temperatures, there is no chance of a pressurized explosion, he said.

Van Tassel went on to explain there is no refrigeration on board the shipping tankers.

“People usually ask “Oh my God, what happens if the refrigeration unit dies,” but there is no refrigeration on board. To understand, you have to go back to high school physics,” he said.

He used the example of boiling water to explain.

“Water boils at a 100 degrees Celsius, if you turn the stove down a little bit, the temperature of the water is not going to change, and it’s going to stay at 100 degrees Celsius. If you turn the stove up, it’s going to boil more rapidly, but it will still be a t 100 degrees Celsius,” he said.

LNG is transported at its boiling point, except instead of being at 100 degrees Celsius, its boiling point is minus 161 degrees Celsius.

“It’s Cryogenic, it’s very cold, but it’s carried at its atmospheric boiling point so we insulate the cargo tanks 0 it’s like turning the stove down.”

Since the cargo is always boiling, there is some gas coming off from the cargo.

“There is this gas that comes off that we have do something with and what we do with it, is we send it back to the engines of the ship and use it as fuel. Depending on the ship-design, we get about half of the fuel propulsion of the ship comes from the cargo comes from the cargo boil off,” he said.

Because the cargo has become so valuable, some of the newer ships actually carry liquefaction plants to capture the vapour boil off and return it to the cargo hold but most still use that gas for propulsion, he said.