10/19/2024
The LNG Facility In Puerto Rico That Could Become A Full-On Nightmare
Gas disasters are the rise, and an import terminal in densely populated San Juan is operating without federal permits.
By Alexander C. Kaufmanv and Hermes Ayala Guzmán
CATAÑO, Puerto Rico — Just before the rain began one afternoon in July, Lissette Avilés Ríos went looking for the best spot along the shoreline to see the ship she feared might bring fiery death.
The nun hopped in her SUV and drove from her convent in this coastal neighborhood on the opposite side of San Juan Bay from scenic Viejo San Juan, past dockyards and down streets where gray pipelines stacked as high as the rooftops hemmed in some houses on two sides. Pulling into a vacant lot on the water, she got out, approached the edge and pulled back the feathery needles of a white pine just barely clinging to the eroding shore.
The letters etched along the red-painted hull of the tanker ship spelled out the cargo: LNG, for liquefied natural gas.
The Coral Encanto arrived in San Juan Bay late one night in January 2023 — months before the United States emerged as the world’s top exporter of methane gas superchilled into a dense liquid form for easier transportation and sold overseas as a fuel that’s generally cleaner-burning than coal or petroleum and more dependable than solar panels and wind turbines.
The ship never left. The semipermanently moored vessel serves as the floating storage unit for a terminal that the energy company now in charge of Puerto Rico’s power plants uses to import LNG. On a summer afternoon, another tanker, the Avenir Accolade, sidled up beside the Coral Encanto, unloading a fresh shipment of the fuel.
To Avilés, it’s a ticking time bomb.
In June 2022, one of the nation’s largest LNG export terminals on the Texas Gulf Coast exploded, sending an orange ball of fire into the sky with a vapor-cloud blast so powerful, two lifeguards at nearby Quintana Beach were blown off their chairs and a toddler fell and bloodied his face on a rock. Federal pipeline safety regulators later released a heavily redacted consultant’s report that blamed inadequate testing and procedures, identifying what experts saw as a growing risk at a time when the U.S. economy was becoming increasingly reliant on burning, liquefying, shipping and selling natural gas.
“There are very serious and unique risks for LNG above and beyond other forms of transporting hydrocarbons due to its high pressure and density,” said Hailey Duncan, a policy adviser at the watchdog group Pipeline Safety Trust. “These risks are especially concerning when a facility is placed near people.”
The Texas LNG terminal’s emergency plan was not “adequate,” environmentalists and community activists complained after the accident.
At least the facility had a federally approved emergency plan.
Here in Puerto Rico, a politically connected natural gas company from New York turned a tanker into a makeshift LNG port in the center of a hurricane-prone metropolis — and, perhaps counterintuitively, insisted to regulators that the improvised import terminal actually meant the whole operation should be free to skip the usual federal safety steps.
New Fortress Energy built its LNG terminal without the required federal permits. Federal regulators later ordered the company to retroactively go through the permitting process, but exempted the project from holding public hearings and allowed the facility to continue operating in the meantime without an approved emergency response plan.
Despite eased requirements, New Fortress has yet to submit a finalized emergency plan and has repeatedly warned investors it may not be able to secure approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Last month, the company said its heavily redacted draft proposal was still under review by local emergency authorities. An updated version is due by the end of November.
In the meantime, however, New Fortress is looking to bring in bigger vessels with even larger shipments of gas, despite a warning in September from the U.S. Coast Guard that the company is bringing in boats too large for San Juan Bay.
New Fortress did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The saga highlights Puerto Rico’s haphazard transition away from petroleum, and illustrates the degree to which voters have been cut out of decisions that lock an already impoverished and deeply indebted island into an energy system that depends on regular imports of a globally traded, planet-heating fuel that’s prone to price shocks.
“It really seems like Puerto Rico is being exploited by New Fortress,” said Cathy Kunkel, an energy researcher based in San Juan who works for the watchdog Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “This is very transparently a push for more natural gas.”
‘Regulatory Gaps’ Haunt All Sides More at .....
Gas disasters are the rise, and an import terminal in densely populated San Juan is operating without federal permits.
