Canadian company announces LNG proposal
It’s official: Canadian Superior Energy announced today that it will collaborate on a $550 million liquefied natural gas project 15 miles off the coast of New Jersey. The project would bring natural gas to New Jersey and other Northeastern states from the Caribbean.
The proposed LNG project, titled “Liberty Natural Gas,” would deliver up to 2.4 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas by late 2011, according to a statement on the company’s website. (Enough to heat 11 million homes per day, the company says.)
It would include 50 miles of offshore natural gas pipeline and eleven miles of onshore pipeline that terminates in Linden. The Jersey City-based Excalibur Energy Inc. — a 50/50 venture between Canadian Superior and Global LNG Inc. — would oversee it.
Excaliber’s CEO, Roger Whelan, said in a statement (via Bloomberg):
The gas will be fed into a buoy located off the coast of Asbury Park, New Jersey, and will flow by pipeline to Linden, a hub for other lines that serve U.S. Northeast markets.
The natural gas involved in the project would come from overseas, including from sites off of Trinidad and Tobago.
The proposed facility would go about its business sight unseen, according to the project’s website. It would be submerged below the ocean’s surface, requiring no floating terminal or man-made island. And it “will have minimal impact on the environment and marine life” and “no impact on the ocean” (from the site).
In a statement today, Clean Ocean Action called the project “the latest assault on the ocean.”
“There is nothing ‘liberating’ about industrializing our ocean, becoming more dependent on foreign fossils fuels, and increasing our energy costs,” Cindy Zipf, the group’s executive director, said in the statement. “We must remain vigilant and stop all three of these monstrous projects — the ocean is no one’s guinea pig.”
Still on the table for the Jersey coast are proposed LNG projects by Atlantic Sea Island Group — “Safe Harbor Energy,” a small island for an LNG terminal and industrial complex 19 miles from Sea Bright — and ExxonMobil — “BlueOcean Energy,” a floating terminal 20 miles from Manasquan.
May 22nd, 2008 at 8:08 am
It’s no surprise we need more energy but beyond all the environmental impacts, it seems incredibly invasive. i have no answers, but wouldn’t it be cool if we had floating wind and solar panels out in the ocean feeding us energy. they would be created by designers, engineers and marine biologists to happily coexist in our oceans. they could be designed to support life AND produce energy. could even serve as way points for migrating birds… or something interesting like that.