This morning, Woodside said it had chosen a site 32km off the Californian coast to be used to transfer LNG to the mainland.
The corporation’s US subsidiary, Woodside Natural Gas, said the OceanWay Secure
Energy project would not need the construction of an LNG terminal onshore or an offshore platform.
Instead, gas will be delivered from specially designed ships through an undersea pipeline to existing gas pipeline facilities in an industrial area near Los Angeles International Airport, with little or no disruption to residential neighbourhoods, Woodside Natural Gas president Jane Cutler said.
The OceanWay site had been chosen carefully to minimise environmental disturbance, maximise the distance from residential areas and ensure the site was a sufficient distance from shipping lanes and marine preserves, according to Cutler.
“One of the biggest advantages of Woodside’s proposal is delivering natural gas in an environmentally sensitive manner,” she said.
“The technologically advanced ships we use are specifically engineered for the delivery of LNG and they eliminate the need for an onshore terminal or an offshore platform.”
Woodside is now beginning the permit application process and will seek approval from federal, state, and local agencies, including the US Coast Guard, California State Lands Commission and California Coastal Commission, before the proposal proceeds.
However, other LNG import proposals have had great difficulty in gaining approvals and the release of Woodside’s plans comes a day after the California State Lands Commission released a report finding that BHPB’s Cabrillo Port proposal posed unavoidable safety and environmental risks.
The commission identified 19 potential “class one” impacts that could not be “mitigated to below their significance criteria”.
The report said the project would increase smog levels and the LNG terminal and its attending fleet of ships would be visible at elevations all along the coast. State law disallows industrial intrusion on highly scenic areas.
It also found there was a very remote possibility of a 20km-wide flash fire reaching to within 10km of the Malibu and Oxnard city limits, which are among negative impacts that cannot be corrected or avoided.
A BHPB spokesman defended the plant’s engineering and location.
“Cabrillo Port’s location of more than 14 miles from the closest point to shore and more than 21 miles from the nearest high-density population centre provides a safety assurance that no other proposed LNG facility can match,” Patrick Cassidy told the Malibu Times newspaper.
“Because of its carefully selected site, the risk of danger to anyone on land simply does not exist.”
The US public now has another 45 days to comment on Cabrillo Port.
The proposal has met with sustained resistance from local councils and residents groups. Woodside said it would run an extensive community outreach program, but BHPB ran a similar program with little success.
