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Article from The New Orleans Times-Picayune: Permits Have Anglers Boiling Mad

Sunday, April 10, 2005
Bob Marshall

"Why can they kill fish we're not allowed to kill?"

"Why are shrimpers told they have to give up part of their profits to protect fish, but the oil companies don't have to?"

Those were as much statements as questions, and they stood out in the debate swirling around the Bush administration's decision to fast-track permits for a type of LNG (liquid natural gas) terminal in the Gulf that could kill a wide array of marine life, including redfish and red snapper.

It was no surprise, however, that the comments came from Maumus Claverie. They say experience is the best teacher, and it seems like Claverie has been representing anglers and conservation on the nation's fisheries panels since Ahab applied for a permit to hunt down Moby Dick. Claverie has the ability to distill a controversy into a single sentence by combining his lawyer's eye for the details in fisheries law with an affinity for common sense. Both of those facilities are mightily offended by what's happening with the gas terminals.

To recap, natural gas can be transported to the U.S. via giant tankers after it is liquefied by freezing it to 260 degrees below zero. But to inject it into the nation's pipeline grid, it must be re-heated into a gas. This can be accomplished one of two ways at the offshore terminals that the oil companies want to build:

-- A "closed loop" system uses about 2 percent of the imported gas as fuel to re-heat the supply. According to the oil companies, that cost could run between $30 to $40 million per year, a price tag they claim is too high -- even though they expect to make about $950 million per year on a facility.

-- The oil companies prefer the much less expensive "open loop" system, which each day runs up to 200 million gallons of warm Gulf water through a type of radiator to re-heat the gas. But according to federal fisheries scientists, everything in the water that gets sucked through the system could be killed, either by the sudden drop in water temperature, the chlorine added to the water, or by being crushed against intake screens.

Estimates of the damage -- which can only be speculative, because there is no experience to base them on -- have been varied and controversial.

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