Thursday, October 29, 2009

ANGA over LNG

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for LNG. Up in Astoria, a Clatsop County commissioner who supported LNG was recalled (pending a recount; she lost by only four votes). And the Oregon Department of Justice announced that it had enough evidence to convict a former Port of Astoria director of misconduct in the lease for the Skipanon Peninsula site — but he’s off the hook because of a statute of limitations.

However, the real blow to LNG comes from the natural gas industry itself.

A consortium called the American Natural Gas Alliance has started running ads that trumpet natural gas as the fuel of the future. And one of the best things about it, say the ads, is that we don’t have to import it.

I’m guessing that companies like Northwest Natural Gas and Pacific Gas & Electric, who are investing in infrastructure to import LNG, are pretty pissed off at ANGA (yes, that’s the acronym). According to the ads (and the website at http://www.newnaturalgas.org/) “we have more than 100 year’s worth of natural gas, right here in the States!”

The gist of the ads is that natural gas burns cleaner than coal (true enough), that it “makes solar and wind energy more viable,” and that there are such massive amounts of it buried right here in North American that we’ll never, ever, ever run out.

Strangely enough, I caught these ads from a motel room in Medford, Oregon, last night. It was the last night of my LNG-themed road trip. And the show I was watching, on CNBC, is called “American Greed.” 

Monday, October 26, 2009

Update: LNG cocktail

Regarding LNG Cocktail (see previous post): Turns out that even one is a bad idea. Euhck.

Friday, October 23, 2009

The LNG Cocktail

2 oz. Russian vodka
shake over ice until very, very cold
strain into a cold glass and top with sparkling wine

One may occasionally appear necessary.
Three is never a good idea.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Road Trip: Coos Bay


Day Three: Coos Bay

Highway 101 crosses the mouth of Coos Bay and heads into the town of North Bend and then, immediately, into the town of Coos Bay. At North Bend I left the highway and headed towards the Southwest Oregon Regional Airport, which appears on my map to be more or less across the water from Jordan Cove.

The Jordan Cove LNG project is owned by Fort Chicago Energy Partners and Energy Projects Development (Pacific Gas and Electric is part owner of the affiliated 234-mile pipeline). This is the one that the San Francisco City Council voted to oppose, although it’s over 100 miles north of the California border.

I parked in the lot of a Bureau of Land Management office building (closed, it was Saturday). The road looks down on the airport runways. The site where the LNG terminal would be build is further to the northwest, across the water. I needed to get around the tip of the headland I was on, and there just happened to be a paved hiking trail going in the right direction.

I headed up and into the woods. It was a dark, wet day, and the forest was thick and dripping. The trees and ferns and shiny salal bushes seemed to have black behind them, like the bark and leaves were painted onto black velvet. I came across a huge cement archway that was the entrance to a tunnel. It was covered in graffiti, and I didn’t get too close, but it looked like the kind of place where people would go to do drugs.

The South Coast forest combines all three kinds of creepy: There’s that nervous feeling you get walking through a bad part of town at night. The feeling you get way out in the woods when you start thinking about cougars. And the feeling you get alone in a 100-year-old house. I felt like I was equally in danger of getting knifed, mauled, or haunted.

Or falling down a hole and never being found.

I got to the edge of a cliff that looked out onto the water. There was an uncovered, manhole-shaped hole in the ground, totally unmarked. It was the opening to a pipe that went down into the cliff and spilled out partway down, over the water.

I took some photos of the opposite shore, but I felt like I was still too far east so I kept going.

I came out onto the street of a raw-looking subdivision. Most of the houses were new, interspersed with vacant lots for sale. You could see from the empty lots that the whole area used to be sand dunes and marsh grass. I walked by one cul-de-sac where nothing had been erected except for some fakey-old-fashioned lampposts and a big plywood sign advertising “Paradise Island.”

Further down, on the edge of the cliff, was an abandoned, unfinished condo complex. It was set of row houses, maybe ten, painted gray and boarded up. A warning notice dated August 3 stated that the building had been deemed “substandard” according to Coos Bay municipal code.

The back decks of the condos overlooked the water, with a perfect view of where, by my best guess, the Jordan Cove LNG project would be built. I got my photo and turned around.

On my way back through the subdivision, a gang of boys, maybe 12 and 13 years old, raced by on their bicycles. I worried about them going out the trail and falling into the pipe hole.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Road Trip: Warrenton


Today, Google Maps let me down.

It doesn’t mention when a road is private, or that it may not be what you’d really call paved.

Skipanon Drive sounded promising, seeing as how I was looking for a site on the Skipanon Peninsula, a little spit of land which sticks out into the Columbia River at Warrenton, close to where the river meets the ocean. The LNG project at Warrenton, funded by a company called Oregon LNG, makes a fair amount of sense as far as location goes — I guess — except for its connector pipe, which would cut across farms and forests for 117 miles to get to Molalla. But the terminal site, at least, is close to the ocean, in an area with a lot of other industry, and in place that, frankly, people don’t care too much about.

Astoria is gorgeous and verging on too touristy. But cross over to Warrenton on 101 and the scene totally changes. Instead of gothic Victorians and a gussied-up small town main street, you’ve got big box stores and ugly little spread-out houses.

I didn’t get too far on Skipanon Drive because it’s gated off: property of Wayerhauser. I could see piles of logs in the distance.

Nearby, though, I found a paved walking trail that looks like it was built over old railroad tracks. It seemed to be headed in the right direction to give me a view across the inlet to where the LNG terminal would be located, so I started walking. It’s a beautiful walk through the forest that opens out, at one point, for a view across the water. There’s bench where a sad-looking woman was sitting. She told me she didn’t know what the park was called.

Eventually the path ends at a place where they were moving big logs around with a crane. Other than that it was peaceful and felt like an oasis of unadulterated nature, with herons and frogs and tall reeds. I took a photo out across the inlet, towards what looked like the undeveloped other half of the peninsula, which may someday be covered with an LNG facility, the view blocked by huge tanker ships.

I returned to the car and decided to drive around the other way, to get closer to the actual site. According to my map, N.E. King Ave. would take me to Bay Fort Road, which supposedly goes straight to the proposed site.

Turns out, King is an unmaintained stretch that was once paved, but is now full of huge potholes (all full of muddy water, no way to tell how deep they are) with ragged shards of pavement sticking up here and there. The Honda handled it better than I expected, and after a long, bouncing time, we got to a big sandy clearing. No Bay Fort Road in sight, just a bunch of off-roader’s tracks going off in different directions into the sand, with tall bushes all around so you couldn’t get any sense of where the water is.

You couldn’t see if from far off, but the whole interior of the area is well-worn tracks in the sand, made by the tires of Jeeps and motorcycles, I think. It is so NOT pristine and untouched.

As I was leaving, a sedan came bucking way too fast up King Ave., full of grinning teenagers who were holding big wax-paper cups of soda in their hands. They disappeared into the scrub.

Moral of the day: If you want to fight LNG, you’re going to have to come up with a more concrete argument than the old, “but look at this place! You’ll ruin it!”

 

Friday, October 16, 2009

Road Trip: Bradwood Landing


Bradwood Road is blocked off.

“No trespassing without permission,” reads a sign. “Violators will be prosecuted.”

Given that I’ll still apparently be trespassing, even with permission to cross the barrier, I decide not to chance it. Besides, this warning sign, along with another sign that reads “Bradwood: Clean Energy, Good Jobs” is enough to tell me I’m in the right place.

I’ve been driving up and down Clifton Road, which veers towards the Columbia River off Highway 30 at a point about 22 miles east of Astoria. I’m looking for the site where NorthernStar Natural Gas wants to build a terminal to receive liquefied natural gas, which would be shipped across the Pacific Ocean and up the Columbia to this godforsaken stretch of shoreline. The supercooled gas would be re-gassified here and shipped by pipeline across the state.

I’m wondering why they chose a place so far up the river, but as my bartender at the Fort George Brewery points out to me later, they needed a place that wasn’t too close to any major settlements. People get nervous about having large amounts of poisonous, flammable gas too close to their homes.

There are a few houses along Clifton Road — five, by my count, plus someone who lives in an Airstream trailer.

It’s really, really quiet out here and there are lots of birds. Pilings from long-gone piers stick out of the water and there’s a disused railroad track. I’m guessing that Clifton was a stop on the tracks back when the Bradwood Landing site was a lumber mill, with a port and company town, back in the early and mid 1900s. (It shut down in 1965.)

Although the water is deep and huge cargo ships travel further up the river than this, dredging would be required for the LNG terminal to work. The project is affiliated with a pipeline that would go from here all the way to east of Maupin. Standing out on the road, here, it’s hard to imagine the whole thing really happening. There are two other LNG proposals in the works right now, one nearby in Warrenton and one down the coast in Coos Bay. This seems like the worst option of the three — but it’s the only site I’ve visited so far. Stay tuned.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Road Trip: Trojan Park




Trojan Park, just south of Ranier, Oregon, is a quiet, peaceful spot. A series of ponds surrounded by grass and trees are home to ducks and geese (I counted three different kinds.) I saw a tree that had been nearly gnawed through by a beaver and several blue herons. I didn’t see any people.

It was too cold for a picnic. The trees all around were turning yellow, red and orange. But it’s a nice place to walk, and I wonder if visitors are put off by the possibility of radioactive exposure.

The tell-tale reactor tower is gone. It was imploded in 2006, as part of a decommissioning process that began in 1992. Trojan operated for only 17 years, shut down by construction errors. Its original lease would have been up in 2011. The reactor core was shipped off to the Hanford Reservation, but, as far as I can determine from web research, a lot of spent fuel rods (aka “high-level radioactive waste”) are still buried on site.

I walked around on some foot paths, and then up onto a road so disused that it was slippery with moss. There’s a big picnic area with covered tables, and even a horseshoe pit, that looks pretty old. They look like they were there while the plant was operating.

At the end of the main road there’s an abandoned office building with an enormous parking lot. There’s a transfer station, and a huge sweep of high tension wires that cross the highway and loop up to the top of ridge.

Walking around, I almost start to feel sorry for the plant. Twelve hundred people worked here. Cheap, reliable power was being pumped into the grid. You could see how someone could get excited about the possibilities. How it might be pretty easy to brush off the down side. You know, the nuclear waste that remains lethal for thousands of years. It’s like not wanting to admit that your miraculous new medicine has terrible side effects.

What I really can’t figure out is why they named it Trojan. The condom jokes were inevitable, and even worse is the association with the Trojan Horse. Looks like a gift, turns out to be a killing machine. What were they thinking?

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

fluffy, faintly glowing bunnies

Here's a fun story I picked up from a fun website: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org
[Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 7 October] A helicopter equipped with radiation detecting equipment has been used to scan almost 4000 hectares of the USA's Hanford nuclear reservation in search of radioactive rabbit droppings. The helicopter was able to map each of the slightly radioactive stools with GPS coordinates. Liquid wastes containing radioactive caesium and strontium salts were stored in underground tanks at Hanford, which rabbits routinely burrowed into. They developed an appetite for the radioactive salts, which resulted in slightly radioactive droppings. Dee Millikin, spokeswoman for CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co which is responsible for much of the environmental cleanup of central Hanford, said that the use of the helicopter - at a cost of some $300,000 - means that the droppings can be located and removed in a matter of days rather than the months that would have been needed for people to search for it on the ground. The droppings will be put into landfill at the Hanford site. Hanford was a plutonium production complex with nine nuclear reactors and associated processing facilities that which played a pivotal role in US defence for more than 40 years starting. The site is now undergoing environmental cleanup managed by the DoE. 

Sunday, October 11, 2009

To the moon


Did we just blow up the moon? Just asking.
The Moonshot (circa 1969)
1 shot gin
2 shots clam juice
1 dash Tabasco
Shake with ice and strain into appropriate glass