Update: Natural Gas Export at Dominion Cove Point
At the forefront of America’s newest energy boom — export of now-abundant natural gas — the standoff continues. Though you wouldn’t know it at first sight.
Trucks are rolling and earth moving as Dominion Cove Point continues on its way to becoming the East Coast’s first liquid natural gas exporter.
“I like the sound of those trucks,” Dominion Energy president Diane Leopold told international dignitaries and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, gathered on Maryland Day to break ground on the $3.5 million expansion of Dominion Cove Point. The two-year-long construction is turning the four-decade-old LNG terminal and storage facility from the primary work of importing LNG for America to exporting it from America.
Exports are to start in 2017, when, said Kazuhiro Takeuchi, “I’m confident we’ll be back for the commissioning ceremony.” Takeuchi is head of Sumitomo Corporation of Americas, a Japanese trading partner in Dominion’s 20-year export contract.
Revving up the noise of heavy equipment is this week’s first barge delivery of equipment to the Solomons’ Patuxent River waterfront, with heavy haul transit the night of May 19.
The energy giant Dominion — a corporation working on just about every energy front, including wind — is moving full speed ahead on Calvert County’s Chesapeake shore with full federal approval. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission authorized the Dominion Cove Point liquefaction project in September. Earlier this month, FERC reaffirmed its authorization against protests from citizen environmental groups and rival energy companies.
Dominion’s rural neighbors on the road to Cove Point — an outcropping of land into the Chesapeake — take no pleasure in the sound of those trucks. For them, construction and subsequent operations are the ruination of quality of life.
“We worry about security every day and the risk of vapor clouds and explosions of propane and LNG, with potential for grave catastrophe,” wrote Tracy Eno, local activist with Calvert Citizens for a Healthy Community, in opposition to the groundbreaking.
On the larger scale, opponents fear that the export approval “failed” — in FERC’s words — “to adequately analyze” and lead the way to “the indirect and cumulative effects of alleged induced natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing activities in the Marcellus and Utica Shale formations” — plus associated environmental harms.
At Cove Point, Washington, D.C., and Dominion’s Virginia headquarters, protestors have marched, picketed, blocked access, climbed heavy equipment and gone to both jail and court.
Lawyers from Environmental Justice and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network continue to sue FERC “to do a complete environmental impact analysis that investigates the cumulative effects of increased natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania and Ohio, additional pipelines and compressor stations across Maryland, and the continued global climate disruption caused by burning fossil fuels like methane,” according to Frank Fox of the Sierra Club of Southern Maryland.
Despite these calls, the U.S. Department of Energy has also approved the export conversion.
“DOE’s rubber stamp cooks the planet,” commented Friends of the Earth Climate and Energy Campaigner Kate DeAngelis.
Amid the opposition, Dominion Cove Point refuses to relinquish the environmental high ground. Earlier this month, the company’s annual beach grass replenishment proceeded. With the help of the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Huntingtown High School students grew, then planted native grasses to protect one of the largest freshwater marshes on the Western Shore of the Bay — on Dominion Cove Point property.
On Saturday, May 30 (9am), the local protest group We Are Cove Point will walk six miles from Solomons Island to Lusby “for Calvert to be Dominion-Free!”