Energy Development

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Liquid Natural Gas Plants

A short stretch of Baja California coastline immediately south of the U.S. border could someday be the scene of about $2 billion in energy projects. Currently, there are four LNG proposals for the area, which is favored for its proximity to several natural-gas-fed power plants under construction or planned, as well to the lucrative Southern California market. The gas projects have been pitched by a unit of Royal Dutch/Shell Group, El Paso Corporation, Marathon Oil Corporation and Sempra Energy. Each involves building piers half a mile or more in length out into the Pacific, where ships bringing supercooled liquid gas from Asia and Latin America would tie up and unload. The liquid would be stored in large silos, then turned back into gas for transmission via a pipeline to users in Baja California and, via another pipeline network, to the Western United States. Each project would cost about $500 million and take three years to complete. Shell's project, which could send out as much as 1.3 billion cubic feet of gas a day, is the largest. ChevronTexaco Corp. is known to be scouting Baja for a fifth LNG project proposal.⁶

• Danger of fire/explosion of both LNG tankers and the storage tanks
• Environmental and visual disruption caused by locating the plant in an environmentally sensitive area
• Incompatibility with local tourism and fishing economic base

At LNG facilities in Boston, the US Coast Guard requires a two-mile moving safety zone around each LNG tanker that enters Boston Harbor, and shuts down Boston's Logan Airport as the LNG tanker passes by. These extraordinary precautions are taken out of concern for the spectacular destructive potential of the fire and/or explosion that might result from an LNG tank rupture. LNG is highly flammable, and more likely to burn than explode. Anyone caught in the flame back would probably be killed. Since the LNG baseload plants and LNG tankers contain such huge amounts of highly flammable and potentially explosive fuel, these plants and tankers are also considered ideal terrorist targets.

The Baja California State Government in accordance with a regional planning project known as COCOTREN has declared the Rosarito-Ensenada corridor a rich tourist and environmental asset. The impact here of a LNG plant would seriously handicap the future development of this area. The tourism/retirement trade's economic impact to the area is much larger than the activity of a LNG plant that would employ only a reduced amount of workers for its operation and that will only generate profits to its owners. While the environmental and safety impacts loom largest in the debate about the liquefied natural gas projects, questions have also come up about public disclosure. Some critics complain that neither the energy companies nor Mexican authorities have adequately informed local residents about the energy projects.

Energy Production- Mexicali Power Plants

Two new electrical generation plants are being built in Mexicali, three miles south of the U.S. border. These plants are being built to supply the Imperial Valley and Southern California markets, and conservationists contend that the planned plants would be sited in Mexico to avoid the restrictions of U.S. environmental laws. According to a recent report by the Imperial County Air Pollution Control District, once the plants begin operating in 2003, they will send more than 4,000 tons of pollutants a year into the skies above Mexicali and neighboring Imperial County.

One plant is being built by Sempra Energy of San Diego and, as reports note, will be outfitted with the latest pollution control devices. The other, being built by the global power generation firm InterGen, wouldn't meet California power plant requirements but is well within Mexican standards. At projected levels, emissions from the two plants will boost total emissions in Mexicali by 12.6 percent. Emissions in the entire cross-border air basis will rise 7.7 percent. Air emissions of nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide at InterGen's La Rosita plant will total 21,026 pounds a day, or 3,838 tons a year. Sempra has pledged that emissions at its plant will be less than one-tenth as much -- 2,066 pounds a day, or 377 tons a year. However, environmental groups contend that the Sempra facility's cooling system, which will reclaim the city's sewage, will waste a potential water resource and dump harmful high-saline water into the ecologically sensitive New River and the Salton Sea.⁷

Another issue surrounding this project is the proposed construction of a pipeline to carry energy from the Mexicali plants to homes and businesses in Southern California. An 80-mile stretch of the proposed North Baja Pipeline is buried under a wide swath of archaeologically rich land. History such as Indian pottery shards, tools left behind by turn-of-the-century miners and an intricate matrix of trails will be gone. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) recently decided 18 sites would be "adversely affected" by pipeline construction, yet on January 16 FERC issued a presidential permit allowing the construction of the North Baja pipeline.