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New plan seen as Broadwater alternative

By Tom Incantalupo | tom.incantalupo@newsday.com

6:10 PM EDT, May 20, 2008

A New Jersey-based venture yesterday proposed a cheaper and, to some environmentalists, preferable alternative to facilities like Broadwater for bringing more natural gas to the New York region: pipelines connected to buoys 15 miles off the Jersey coast, to which liquid natural gas tankers would deliver regassified fuel.

The $550 million Liberty Natural Gas Transmission Project is proposed by Jersey City-based Excaliber Energy (USA) Inc., a joint venture between Canadian Superior Energy Inc. of Calgary, Alberta, and Global LNG Inc., described in the announcement as a New York-based private company.

Promoters and some environmentalists said the buoy system is better than a floating barge such as Broadwater because it would interfere less with recreational boating, be less of a potential terrorist target, and be less of a visual blight.

Executives at energy companies not affiliated with the new venture contended, however, that Liberty's 2.4 billion cubic feet a day of gas won't help increase gas supplies in New York because pipelines across the Hudson are at capacity. Said John Hritcko, Houston-based Broadwater Energy's top executive in this area, "It serves New Jersey, not the Long Island area."

Executives at other companies also said that few of the world's hundreds of liquid natural gas tankers have onboard regassification capability, that those with such capacity tend to be small and that offloading operations at such buoys are difficult in the heavy seas common in the Atlantic during winter, when demand for gas is highest. Broadwater, which is proposed for Long Island Sound, would accept gas from tankers in liquid, not gaseous, form and then regassify it, as would the Atlantic Sea Island project proposed 13.5 miles south of Long Beach and an Exxon barge proposed east of Asbury Park, N.J..

Roger Whelan, Excalibur's president and chief executive officer, said in an interview that, while only three of the world's liquid natural gas tankers can regassify liquid natural gas on board, five others are under construction. As for weather, he said, the buoy technology was developed in Europe's North Sea. "It's very tried and tested," he said.

A similar buoy and pipeline arrangement was completed last year 13 miles south of Gloucester, Mass., near Boston, by Houston-based Excelerate Energy. Whelan's proposal needs approval from the Coast Guard, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and New Jersey. Its piplines would come ashore at South Amboy or Perth Amboy, Wheland said, and connect with existing gas pipelines 11 miles inland in the Linden area.

Canadian Superior's main business is exploring for crude oil and natural gas in Western Canada, offshore Nova Scotia, and offshore Trinidad and Tobago. In January it announced a large natural gas discovery offshore Trinidad and in February announced it had begun drilling a second well nearby.

But some New Jersey environmentalists don't like Excalibur's proposal any better than the others in the Atlantic. "There is nothing 'liberating' about industrializing our ocean, becoming more dependent on foreign fossils fuels, and increasing our energy costs," Cindy Zipf, executive director of the group Clean Ocean Action, said in a reference to the "Liberty" name.

But a key Broadwater opponent, executive director Adrienne Esposito of Long Island-based Citizens Campaign for the Environment, sees pipeline and buoy proposals like Liberty as preferable to floating terminals. "They do not require large scale security zones," she said. "They are very unlikely terrorist targets and they can be designed to not interfere with other commercial and recreational uses of the waterway."