New York, Connecticut push feds to reverse Broadwater OK

BY TOM INCANTALUPO | tom.incantalupo@newsday.com

8:16 PM EDT, April 22, 2008

Federal energy regulators are being formally urged by state and local officials and environmentalists in New York and Connecticut to reverse a decision approving the Broadwater liquid natural gas facility.

New York State officials on April 10 denied permission to Broadwater Energy of Houston to site its facility in the Long Island Sound midway between Wading River and the Connecticut shoreline. That will kill the proposal, unless Broadwater is able to get the U.S. Department of Commerce to overrule New York State or, if that fails, takes the state to court and prevails.

Worried about those possibilities, state and local officials on both sides of the Sound are, in effect, trying to buy some insurance by getting the project's March 20 approval by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission overturned on the grounds of potential environmental damage to the Sound and a contention that the commission violated federal law by making its decision before New York State officials had made theirs.

"The state is trying to insure that its decision is properly respected by [the commission]," Paul DeCotis, New York's deputy energy secretary, said yesterday. The state contends that the commission's March 20 decision is moot because one of the conditions accompanying that permit was New York State's approval -- now denied. "By definition, de facto, because the state [disapproved], the [commissoin] license is no longer granted," he said.

Separately yesterday, environmentalists in New Jersey charged at a beachfront rally that "high-ranking officials from New York and Connecticut are sacrificing the Jersey Shore to save Long Island Sound" by favoring the Atlantic as a better location than the Sound for liquid natural gas plants.

The protesters on the beach in Sea Bright are worried, as are some on Long Island's South Shore, about the impact on fishing grounds if Broadwater were to relocate its proposed site or from at least two other liquid gas plants proposed for federal waters in the Atlantic. One of those is by the Atlantic Sea Island Group Llc on a 60.5-acre man-made island 13.5 miles due south of Long Beach, and the other is a floating facility like Broadwater's -- proposed by Exxon 20 miles east of Asbury Park and about 30 miles south of Nassau County.

In a letter yesterday to New York Gov. David A. Paterson, Cindy Zipf, executive director of the New York/New Jersey coalition Clean Ocean Action, wrote, "Navigation, safety concerns, air and water quality, habitat, rights of citizens -- all values you defended in the Long Island Sound -- are equally, if not of greater value, off these shores."

Officials of Broadwater, a venture between Shell and TransCanada, have not yet announced whether they will appeal to the Commerce Department. In a statement yesterday, the venture's top local executive, senior vice president John Hritcko, said, "Broadwater believes the pleadings [to the commission] are without merit and will make its determination in due course."

Energy regulatory commission spokeswoman Tamara Young-Allen said the requests for reconsideration often are evaluated within 30 days but sometimes take longer.

Monday was the deadline under commission rules for filing of such petitions. Those on file yesterday on the publicly accessible commission docket were from the New York State Departments of State and Environmental Conservation, Suffolk County, and the towns of Huntington, Brookhaven, Riverhead, Southold and East Hampton; the Connecticut Fund for the Environment; and the Connecticut attorney general's office and commissioner of environmental protection.